Science Fiction Monthly v01n11 (1974 11)

VOLUME 1 NUMBER 11 30p

^aONTHLY

This Issue
SFM Calendar 1975
Extraterrestrial Life-ls
anybody there?

Artist Interview with
Roger Dean

Fanzines In Focus

Jack Arnold Interview

Fiction from:
Olaf Stapledon
Douglas Fulthorpe
David S Garnett

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SCIENCE FICTION

Volume 1 Number 11 AAONTHLY

Editor

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Contents

Jack Arnold

SF Film Director Extraordinaire

2

The Artist in Science Fiction : Roger Dean

6

Modern Masters of Science Fiction

by Walter Gillings

Number Five : Olaf Stapledon

9

A World of Sound by Olaf Stapledon

10

Fanzines In Focus : Speculation

12

SFM Calendar 1975

14

The Legend of GX-1 1 8
by Davids Garnett

16

Are You Alive (and Intelligent) Out There

?

byCD Renmore

18

The Last Weapon by Douglas Fulthorpe

22

Book Review .-The Dispossessed
by Ursula Le Guin

25

News by Julie Davis

26

Readers' Letters

27

The Query Box

27

Cover;

Plum Duff in outer space. Illustration by Ray Winder

NEW EIMGLI5H LIBRARY

TIMES MIRROR

Future Issues

Amidst these glossy and colourful pages next year, as time marches on and SFM
Vol 2 comes into being, we will try to live up to our name and oflFer you more
original fiction. Since our short story competition we’ve collected enough short
stories to scupper a space-ship, so it’s only a matter of time before these appear in
print. The winning entries will begin to appear in the next issue (Vol 1 No 12) and
from then onwards nothing will stand in our way.

Fiction aside, brace yourself for Mike Ashley’s forthcoming articles on the
wizard of sf, Michael Moorcock, and the man with the Dangerous Visions, Harlan
Ellison. Walter Gillings continues his series of articles Modem Masters of Science
Fiction with stories and biographies of such writers as Jack Williamson, John
Campbell, AE Van Vogt, Brian Aldiss, Frank Herbert and many others.

In the future SFM will be devoting more space to sf in the cinema and on tv;
John Brosnan is engaged in preparing an article on this theme at the moment, with
special emphasis on Star Trek and Dr Who. We are hoping to arrange for more
timely film reviews and also advance news of films being made and about to be
released.

Still on the more visual side of sf, we have plans to publish some of the black and
white artwork submitted for our sf art competition. We’ve come to tbe end of our
series The Artist in Science Fiction, although isolated interviews and articles on this
topic will, of course, appear from time to time. In fact the publication of Anthony
Frewin’s book One Hundred Years of Science
Fiction Illustration provides just such an oppor-
tunity for some more comment on sf art.

Peter Weston has already demonstrated his
comprehensive knowledge of science fiction with
his article Don’t Laugh Earthling, I am the
Ambassador from Sirius V! which appeared in
SFM Vol I No 9. In future issues he ydll be
tracing more themes in sf such as: Time travel;

Psi-powers; Parallel worlds; Spaceships over
the years; Catastrophe novels; Alien possession;

Galactic empires; Matter transmitters; Immor-
tality etc, etc. In addition to this Peter went to
America for the World SF Convention and
we’ll be publishing his report on that.

Malcolm Edwards reviews The Dispossessed,

Ursula Le Gain’s new novel, in this issue of
SFM and next month turns his attention to
Philip K Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Next year he hopes to
interview a number of well-known authors starting off with Samuel Delany; this
should appear in SFM Vol 2 No 3.

Other items arranged for your continuing delight and edification include:
a regular comic strip; sf and fashion; more mention of music, and anything else
exciting that happens. Science fiction is a literature of freedom and of ideas and in
1975 SFM will be striving to reflect this ideal.

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 1

Jack Arnold sf Rim

Director Extraordinaire

If you remember such great sf films as It Came From Outer Space and
The Incredible Shrinking Man you will already be familiar with the work
of Jack Arnold. In this personal interview JOHN BROSNAN has managed
to discover the techniques behind directing tarantulas, barracudas and

The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

Ot the many so-called science fiction films produced in Hollywood during
the 1950s only a handful are in any way memorable. These include such
films as The Thing, War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the
Body Snatchers . . .and the films of Jack Arnold. He directed two fine science
fiction films — It Came from Outer Space (based on a story by Ray Bradbury),
and the classic The Incredible Shrinking Man (with a screenplay by Richard
Matheson based on his own novel). But even Arnold's monster films, such
as The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Tarantula, possess a distinctive
flair that is missing from similar productions of the period. In his book Science
Fiction in the Cinema, John Baxter describes Arnold as 'the great genius
of the American fantasy film' and adds that his series of films made for
Universal Studios between 1953 and 1958 have few equals in the cinema
for sheer virtuosity of style and clarity of vision.

Jack Arnold's film career really began when he was a young actor working
on Broadway before the Second World War. On his days off he would film
his fellow actors on stage, using a sound-proofed 16mm camera, and then
sell them the results. This lucrative hobby came in handy when, after Pearl

Harbour, Arnold joined the Army Signal Corps while waiting to get into a
pilot training school. The Army Signal Corps were making training films of all
kinds and Arnold found himself working under the great documentary-film-
maker Robert Flaherty. Flaherty and Arnold became good friends and during
the five months he was with him Arnold received an invaluable crash-course
in film-making.

After the war Arnold and a friend formed a company to make documentaries
which was very successful. It was for one of these documentaries that Arnold
received an Academy Award nomination and this led to an offer from Universal
Studios to direct feature films. The first of these was in 1 950 and was a picture
about teenagers growing up in the slums of New York. Originally called
Night Flowers it was released under the title of Girls in the Night, but it did
well at the box office and Arnold received other directing assignments from
Universal. One of these, in 1953, was It Came from Outer Space, an eerie
film about a group of aliens who take over the bodies of the inhabitants of a
small desert town in order to repair their crashed spaceship.

2 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

How did ‘It Came from Outer Space' come to
be filmed ?

Arnold: It started because Universal had bought
a story by Ray Bradbury with that name. They
thought it could be successfully adapted to make
a 3D picture. 3D had just come out and Warner
Brothers had Just released one called The House
of Wax which was a hurriedly put together thing
in order to throw objects at people in 3D. So
Universal assigned it to me and it was quite
successful. So from there on I made all their
science fiction films.

Did you resent having to do these type of films ?
Arnold : No. I loved science fiction. I had always
been a science fiction fan. As a kid I used to buy
all the sf pulp magazines. I loved them. I was very
pleased that I was assigned to do it Came from
Outer Space because I was still an avid fan. And
the more I did of these films the more I liked it
because the studio left me alone. No one at that
time was an expert at making sf films so I claimed
to be one. I wasn't, of course, but the studio
didn't know that so they never argued with me,
no matter what I did.

7f Came from Outer Space' was a marvel-
lously atmospheric picture.

Arnold: I tried to create an atmosphere because
I think if you shoot an imaginative film ... a film
in which you ask an audience to believe things
that are bizarre . . . you have to make them believe
it. You can't do this with the story or actors alone
but you have to create a kind of atmosphere
while shooting it in which their credibility will be
suspended to the point where they don't say to
themselves — 'That's impossible.' And I think the
only way you can get an audience to accept the
impossible is to get them involved in an atmos-
phere ... a mood, or what the kids today call
vibes, a feeling of what you're trying to do. That's
why I make a lot of use of actual physical locations
... I make them work for my story. That's why I
like to shoot in the desert, or on the ocean or
beaches, locations that will help me to create an
atmosphere. Most of It Came from Outer Space
was shot out in the desert . . . only the interiors
were shot in the studio, and also the scenes in the
little town which was on the Universal back lot.
Everything else was shot out in the desert. The
space ship, was of course, a model. We built
a full-scale section of it and a crew went out
in the desert and dug a big crater for it. Then
we matched shots of it with miniatures for scenes
of the actual space ship.

Did you shoot 'Tarantula' in the same area ?
Arnold: Yes ... in the same area about 10 or
15 miles in the desert to the north of Hollywood.
Actually it was a place called Dead Man's Curve
where there was an outcropping of rocks that I
particularly wanted to use. I would just go into
the desert and look for something that looked
eerie and if it gave me the shivers I would say,
right . . . we'll shoot here.

Clifford Stine was in charge of the special effects
on many of your films, wasn't he ?

Arnold: Yes. Originally he was my cameraman
but he was made the head of Universal's special
effects department ... he was a very knowledge-
able and very good cameraman. We worked very
well together. We had a lot of crazy problems to
work out while making those films. For instance,
in The Incredible Shrinking Man, apart from the
problems of shrinking him down to less than an
inch and getting him down into the cellar and
having him fight the spider we had the problem
of making drops of water look large. The drops
were supposed to be coming from a leaking hot
water unit. The hero, played by Grant Williams,
who incidentally gave a tremendous performance,
I thought, was living in a matchbox underneath it.
Now Grant was 6' 1 " tall and so everything had to
be built in proportion on the set to make him look
1 " tall. But the problem was to get the drops to
look huge in comparison to him. We tried every-
thing. We were using the biggest sound stage
there was at Universal and we got up on the top
and rigged a device that released water a small
amount at a time but the water would spread
out on the way down and look useless. Then I
remembered a little bit about my ill-spent youth
when as a kid I found a box of contraceptives. I
didn't know what they were at the time but I
discovered that they made dandy bombs when
you filled them with water. I used to drop them
on top of people from windows and I remembered
that they used to hold a tear-shaped form on their
way down. So I got hold of one at the studio,
filled it with water and had one of the guys drop

it from the top of the sound stage. It turned out
to be the perfect proportion and splattered just
like a large drop of water when it hit the floor. So
I ordered a hundred gross of the things and we
rigged up a treadmill that dropped them at an
increasing rate until we opened the gates of the
tank and released tons of water on top of Grant
for the big flood scene. But the really amusing
part came at the end of the picture . . . the produc-
tion office called me in to go over the facts and
figures of the costs. They told me there was one
item that they didn't understand. I asked what it
was and they said it was this order for a hundred
gross of contraceptives. I said, fellows, it was
such a hard picture and we all worked so hard
we decided to have a big party at the end of it.

The scenes with Grant fighting the spider are
extremely well done. How difficult were they to
film?

Arnold: It was very difficult. I had to shoot
the spider in his web, then I had to make the
spider come down from his web and come along
the ledge, then I had to impale him with a bent
pin, which was supposed to have been thrown
by the tiny Grant Williams. It took a number of
attempts before it worked. It's very hard to direct
a spider. I finally worked it out by using air jets
... I would prod hirn in the direction I wanted
him to move with spurts of air. We flew in sixty
Panamanian tarantulas because the domestic ones
were too small and we couldn't keep a sharp
focus on them. We had to get the biggest ones
available and they turned out to be in Panama.
They were tremendous beasts ... 6" in diameter I
We used about sixty of them during the filming
because we had to light to such a high intensity
they almost cooked.

Isn't it hard to direct an actor when he's supposed
to be reacting to something that isn't really there ?
Arnold: Well, the only insurance a director has
in that situation is to have good actors. When I
cast for these sf films I tried to get actors who
were intelligent, had imagination and were good
at their craft. So that if I told them the story and
what was supposed to be happening at a given
time they were able to reconstruct it themselves.
For instance, in The Incredible Shrinking Man I
shot the scenes with the spider first, then in
Universal's largest sound stage we built full-size
replicas of part of the wall, the ledge, spider web,
pair of scissors, ball of twine etc . . . all at a size
that would make Grant look an inch tall in
comparison. Then I would run the film of the
spider that I had shot previously and cut it the
way I wanted. Then, with a metronome, I counted
out beats for the time the spider's actions took.
The sound stage was blacked out except for the
over-size sets so I would set up my camera with
a piece of negative of the shot of the spider placed
in the camera's ground glass and then match
up the sets with the scene on the negative . . .
overlaying the two images until they became one.
When we did that we knew we had vertical and
horizontal correct. The camera had to be about
250' away from Grant and the sets so that he
would look small. Then I would rehearse Grant
in what he had to do. With my count on the
metronome we would time it all ... at every
count Grant would have a different action to
perform. He would go up and shake the web . . .

that would last maybe for eight counts . . . then
on nine counts the spider started down ... on
fourteen counts the spider was down ... on
eighteen he was coming closer ... on nineteen
something else happened and so on. All of it was
timed to match in exactly with the footage of the
spider. Grant did it all by numbers, having to
imagine what was happening at each point. Then
when we had two pieces of film we just married
them together into a single piece of film and
there it was. You would swear that Grant and the
spider were together on the ledge.

The image components match very well together.
None of the jiggling that you often get with the
blue screen system of travelling mattes.

Arnold: There was no jiggling at all with our
technique. Cliff Stine and his effects team worked
it all out mathematically. We had to do only one
re-take because of a mistake his department
made . . . that was in a scene when Grant was
supposed to be 3' tall. It was a split-screen scene
and he was supposed to put his arm around his
wife but we ended up 1mm off so we had to
shoot one side of the split screen again. But that
was the only time in the whole picture. Cliff
was a genius. The blue screen process wasn't in
use when I made Shrinking Man. We used a

combination of making our own mattes and rear
projection. Anyway, blue screen work always
looks a bit phoney to me ... if you're not careful
you often have a green line around people. It's
very tricky to do properly.

Whatever happened to Grant Williams after he
appeared in your film ?

Arnold: I don't know. He never did catch on
with the public. His looks weren't in vogue in
the 1950s. Grant was blonde and blue-eyed,
kind of too pretty to be a character actor but not
quite the picture book Rock Hudson or Robert
Taylor type that Hollywood wanted at that time.
He was short-changed, he never got the right
parts. In our films, the science fiction ones, the
picture itself was the star, and the special effects,
but the actor was never the star. Yet in The
Shrinking Man almost three-quarters of the film
was silent ... it required real acting, it wasn't
just a case of reciting banal dialogue as happened
in so many sf films. Grant had to act . . . and I
thought he gave an outstanding performance but
it didn't help his career. Universal didn't take him
out of that and put him into an A picture as they
should have done, they just put him into more B
pictures. That's happened to us all in this business
at one time or other . . . directors, actors, writers.
Lady Luck sometimes sits on your shoulders but
other times she's busy elsewhere.

Of your sf films is ‘The Shrinking Man' your
favourite ?

Arnold: Yes. Definitely. It was the most challen-
ging because it hadn't been done before. They
had done a film similar only in the sense that the
people were small, that was Dr Cyclops, but they
stayed one size. Neither did it have the atmosphere
that I thought that sort of situation required . . .
the situation of being so small that the common-
place suddenly becomes bizarre and threatening.
Where as in The Shrinking Man an ordinary cellar
becomes a hell of a place filled with monsters.

I wanted to make the audience realise that their
own cellars were potential hells . . . that the fami-
liar could become horrible if the circumstances
were changed. In the same vein I once wrote a
story called The Other Side of the Moon which
starts off in this spaceship which is in trouble. It
gets drawn into the gravitational pull of an un-
known planet and crash-lands in a jungle. The
crew tries to survive in the jungle and while they
are exploring they keep finding peculiar things
that give them the idea that the place was once
inhabited by human beings . . . they find pieces
of railway track and big objects made of rubber
. . . and periodically they are inundated with a
torrent of water though the sky is always clear
at the time. Then they get attacked by these
giant insects . . . giant ants, spiders, etc and
eventually by the end of the picture everyone is
killed. And then a giant hand reaches down and
picks up their crashed space ship and it turns out
that the setting is Earth and that they had landed
in someone's back garden. All the objects they
found were a child's toys, the monsters were just
ordinary garden insects and the torrents of water
were coming from a sprinkler. What had been
hell for them was an ordinary garden lawn. Once
again I wanted to create the atmosphere of having
familiar things become objects of terror and
mystery. But I couldn't sell it to any of the studios
. . . they didn't like the idea of everyone dying in
the end. They wanted a happy ending.

Whose idea was ‘The Creature from the Black
Lagoon'?

Arnold: He was a composite creation. The
producer who was assigned to make these sf
films. Bill Alland, who is no longer in the business,
found this story by Maurice Zimm and he called
me in on it. We worked on it together, and also
with a writer, and we evolved the creature, or Gill-
Man as it came to be known. Then we sold the
story to the studio. We had a lot of fun trying
to create the monster . . . trying to decide what
he should look like. We made a lot of tests before
we decided on what appeared in the film and it
turned out very good.

Where did you shoot those marvellous underwater
scenes ?

Arnold: We shot them at Silver Springs in
Florida. Very clear water there ... or it was. I
thought there was a mystery and romance to the
underwater scenes and also a sense of terror. I
think we succeeded in capturing that feeling in-
The Creature. Those scenes with the girl swimming
on the surface and the monster looking up at her
from below played upon a basic fear that people
have about what might be lurking below the

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 3

'We flew in sixty Panamanian tarantulas because the domestic ones
were too small and we couldn't keep a sharp focus on them. We had to
get the biggest ones available and they were tremendous beasts 6" in
diameter. We used all sixty of them during filming because we had to

light to such an intensity they almost cooked!'

Leo G Carroll experiences one of the unpleasant side-effects of scientific research (from TARANTULA,
courtesy Universal Pictures)

surface of any body of water. You know the
feeling when you are swimming and something
brushes your legs down below ... it scares the
hell out of you if you don't know what it is. It’s
the fear of the unknown. So I decided to exploit
this fear as much as possible in filming The
Creature from the Black Lagoon. But I also wanted
to create sympathy for the. creature ... or my
little beastie as we called it . . . because I liked
him. I'd gone to Florida to find an underwater
swimmer and we found a boy who was swimming
in a show who could hold his breath for five
minutes ata time.

He didn't use air tanks at all during the filming ?
Arnold: No. He was such a good underwater
swimmer that what we had was an air hose off-
scene and when he felt he needed air he would
swim over to it, take a deep breath then swim
back to the scene. That way he could stay under-
water for ages. We couldn't build air tanks into
the costume because then you would have seen
the bubbles. But he was sensational. His name
was Ricou Browning. He became a director later
and I believe he's directing a TV series down in
Florida at the moment. I n the second film {Revenge
of the Creature) we filmed him in a fish tank in
Florida. The first one had done very well at the
box office so the studio wanted a sequel. We
dreamed up a story about. the Gill-Man being
captured and put in an oceanarium in Florida.
When I went down to scout locations the
oceanarium people showed me this tremendous
tank full of sharks, barracuda, moray eels, even an
octopus. They were fed by divers going into the
tank and feeding them by hand. I looked into
the tank and said, could you guys possibly screen
off half the tank with a net and then take out the
most dangerous fish so that I can shoot the
creature inside it. I told them I not only had to get
the creature in the tank but also my leading man
and lady. I said if they took one look at those
sharks in there I would never get them in. So they
assured me they would but when I returned with
the company and we got ready to shoot I saw
there was no net. Where's the net, I asked. And
they said, you don't need a net . . . those fish
won't bother your actors . . . they're too well-fed.
So I was in a fix. How was I going to get my
actors to go in. there? Now I had a crazy camera-

man on that picture, he was nuts. He said to me
that I'd better go into the tank with him to
demonstrate to the actors that it was safe. He
talked me into it so I put on a mask and air tanks
and jumped in. I closed my eyes at first. After a
while I opened one eye and there was a damn
shark, at least 12' long, his mouth open and
looking at me. And he was only about a yard
away. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know
whether to make any movement or to stay
absolutely still ... so I just shut my eyes again.
It seemed the best thing to do. Then he brushed
by me and I felt his skin ... it was like sandpaper.
I shot to the surface then and said, come on in
. . . nothing to it! But the amazing thing is that
by the third day . . . after all our initial reluctance
to go in the tank ... all of us were so used to the
sharks that we were actually kicking them out of
the way. The only animal that gave us any
trouble was a turtle. It developed a liking for the
creature's costume and kept biting chunks out of
it. Finally we had to assign a grip to stay under-
water with the sole job of making sure that the
turtle didn’t bother our monster.

Were the budgets on those films relatively tight ?
Arnold; Well, for those days they weren't. We
spent about seven to eight hundred thousand
dollars which was a lot of money for a film in the
1 950s. That's what made the difference between
our science fiction films and many that followed
. . . such as the ones that American International
Pictures made and the Japanese ones. They
just went out to exploit the market without trying
to do anything imaginative. But our budgets were
fairly large. It wasn't a budget that they would
give, say, to a Lana Turner picture but it was
above average for a B picture.

'Tarantula' was very good for a monster film.
Did you use the same technique to control the
spider that you used in 'The Shrinking Man'?
Arnold; Yes. We controlled it with air jets. What
we did was match the rocks in the studio to the
actual rocks out there in the desert, then shoot
them in perspective. We’d push the spider about
with the air jets until I got the shot I wanted. I
would want, say, a leg to appear over the top of
the hill first, then the mandibles etc. Usually after
about ten attempts we got the shot I wanted. We’d
shoot the spider against a black background then

Scientist Leo G Carroll inspects his work in a scene
from Jack A mold 's TARANTULA? courtes y Uni versal
Pictures)

The spaceship from IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
. . . actually a miniature, and so is the figure of a
man (courtesy Universal Pictures)

superimpose it into the scenes with the live actors.

What have you been doing since making your
science fiction films ?

Arnold: Well, I've been making other films, such
as The Mouse That Roared . . . and I got involved
in TV too. I was the Executive Producer on the
It Takes a T/r/e? series with Robert Wagner. Now
I've formed my own company to make films. I'm
tired of doing TV now . . . too much hard work
fortoo little artistic satisfaction. The money is good
but it's like working in a sausage factory. With
my own company I've got the financial backing to
make three films. I'd like one of them to be a
science fiction film. I'm constantly looking for
suitable science fiction stories to film but I
haven't been able to find anything. I’m still in
the market though. If anyone wants to send me a
story I will read anything. I love science fiction, I
think it's a staple like the western in film making
. . . more so because it requires a great deal of
imagination ... at least the good ones do. They
demand more from an audience than the average
escapist fare.

Then you still read a lot of science fiction ?
Arnold: I read as much as I can. I've read a lot
of sf books but so few of them are suitable for
filming . . . not suitable for the films / want to
make, anyway. I want stories that I can create
an atmosphere with but so many of them are like
technical manuals. Robert Heinlein has written
a couple of books that I like . . . such as the one
about the huge starship that has become a world
unto itself {Universe) as it drifts through space.
I was interested in filming that and also Stranger
in a Strange Land, a great story. Columbia bought
that but they don't know what to do with it.
They've spent a lot of money having different
versions written but they still haven't licked the
problem. But the answer is right there in the
book ... all you have to do is dramatise what
Heinlein wrote without trying to improve on it.
I think it would make a good movie and I may
try and get it away from Columbia. Another point
in its favour is that it wouldn't require elaborate
special effects. I've been trying to get Richard
Matheson to write one for me again ... he wrote
Shrinking Man . . . he's a beautiful writer. We
might get together and see if we can dream up a
suitable story. But that's in the future ... if my
health lasts that long, or / last that long. I've got
a lot of plans, I just hope I've got enough time
to fulfil them.<^

4 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

the Artist in

Sdenceficflion

By Julie Davis

Dean, Roger
Age : 30

Educated : Four years at
Canterbury and three years at
The Royal College of Art.

Work includes record sleeves
for Yes, Osibisa, Greenslade,
Uriah Heep, Badger and many
other bands; the sleeve designs
are also available as wall
posters. His involvement with
Yes has also extended to the
design of their stage sets.

He also dabbles in furniture
design and an example of this
can be seen and sat on at

Ronnie Scott's Club, London.

Roger Dean is possibly the
foremost illustrator of record sleeves
in this country, his work can be
found wrapped around the
recorded music of Yes, Osibisa,
Uriah Heep and many others. The
first sleeve to attract major interest
was the design for the first Osibisa
album which featured the flying
elephant now so characteristic of
the band. It seems that Roger’s
distinctive style is so unique that
once you've seen one album sleeve

you can recognise them all, if not
from his artwork then from his
familiar style of lettering (although
there are about ten exceptions to
this rule).

But Roger's main interest and
indeed his motivation to design
such aesthetic packaging is not just
a ploy to sell an album or even to
deriv: some personal satisfaction
from creating a 'pretty picture'.
Many of his paintings are
essentially three-dimensional
architectural designs and often his
involvement with album sleeves is
simply to use them as a medium
to propagate his architectural
ideas.

In fact it was his work with
three-dimensional objects that
occasioned his debut as a sleeve
artist. It so happened that whilst
working on a design for a seating
arrangement in the first floor
discotheque at Ronnie Scott's he
left his college notebook lying
around and the manager of a group
called Gun began leafing through
it and found a drawing he wanted
to use on the sleeve of their album

Race With The Devil. That was in
1967 and since then Roger has
illustrated over fifty-one covers.

Roger's designs obviously have
a very wide appeal and probably
help to sell the albums they
package. In fact they may fulfil the
same purpose as the well-
packaged cake-mix in the
supermarket. On this point Roger
commented :

'The attractiveness in the
drawings is partially incidental and
partially an attempt on my part to
make people want to like them,
so that I can introduce them to
other ideas which I want them to
like and which aren't just pretty
pictures. My drawings are not
about art at all, I am not interested in
art, I am not interested in fantasy
in the sense that your magazine is.
What I am interested in is putting
ideas represented on the sleeves
actually into practice. If some of
those buildings and some of those
sections of worlds appeal I don't
want them to appeal only out of
the pages of a book, I want people
to be able to walk around them.

f *'**~*tA'

climb the staircases, walk the
corridors.'

Roger's vision of his cover
designs becoming reality forms
part of his ambition to build a
structure based on natural forms.

He explained the motivation behind
this :

'Architecture is designed to a
set of criteria, they call it
functionalism but they dress it up
with aesthetics, but the basis of it
is that the materials and
technology work together
comfortably and are checked by the
economics. The design is intended
for mechanical man, for ergonomic
man. My objection to that was that
it didn't accommodate the
emotional human being; I was
doing some research on sleeping
and it's quite obvious that whether
people sleep comfortably or not
isn't to do with whether they have
a good mattress or not it's to do
with whether they are feeling
uneasy, nervous or relaxed and at
ease. I tried to see if it was
possible to determine these things
architecturally, and it was, you can

make somebody uncomfortable
and you can make somebody
comfortable architecturally by
altering their position in space and
their relationship with the rest of
the room.

The ideas are very strategic in
concept, it's very similar to
defending yourself against attack
in a way. Especially when sleeping,
you are in a very passive state so
you need to be in a very good
strategic position in relation to the
rest of the room and anyone who
may appear in it. These are the kind
of ideas I was utilising to get the
house together; to some degree
and in some form these things apply
to the whole house.'

To the uninitiated Roger's ideas
for a house may be
incomprehensible but he admits
that there are really no words to
describe it :

'The vocabulary of architecture is
based on Euclidean plane
geometry and nothing I do is
derived from that. It's incredible
how imprecise we are about
organic architecture, maybe we

ought to use medical terms
because they describe the function
and not the shape.'

Roger confessed to being an sf
addict in a sense although he made
some rather scathing comments
about the genre :

'Science fiction is unfortunate in
having a most unsatisfactory
framework of existence; it's
considered literary kitsch. I believe
it should be the mainstream of
literature because all the books that
have become important down the
generations of civilisation have
been books about ideas.
Superficially science fiction would
seem to offer the most scope for
idea content, but the promise is
unfulfilled, good ideas and good
writing rarely coincide. All too
often the medium is used for
entertainment alone and its
potential beyond this should be
obvious to everyone. I don't just
mean in the sense of fantasy
technology, the potential for
anticipating human evolution is
there and perhaps the means to
bring it about and definitely the

means to bring about a social
evolution.

'Science fiction is a long standing
frustration with me; it’s the area I
want to read in with the most
exciting material but, there’s just
not enough done. I wonder if the
heralds of science fiction are using
.he right medium. I wonder if
producing a book is the most
successful way of broadcasting an
idea which one considers sf.

The quality of sf suggests that it
isn't though there is obviously a lot
of imagination at work.'

Lately a lot of Roger's time has
been devoted to compiling a book
about his work which is
scheduled for publication in the
New Year. Through the book,
which features primarily his record
sleeve designs he hopes to catch
the attention of people who
already like his illustrations and
then feed them with his ideas for
buildings, cities, worlds and
galaxies. Included in the book will
also be some mention of his work
with Yes for whom he designed
some very interesting stage sets.

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 7

Barry Robson

Modern Masters of
Science Fiction

By Walter Gillings

He told the story of the whole cosmos in two volumes . . . and his hero was the entire

species of Man.

8 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

5: OLAF STAPLEDON To dyed-in-the-wool science

fiction fans, not to have read Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men is the
unforgivable sin. Yet to most of today's readers Stapledon's name conveys
little or nothing. Very few anthologies include an extract from his works,
which are not always easy to come by. He never wrote for the popular
magazines — and, anyway, his books were not written as science fiction;
he called them 'fantastic fiction of a semi-philosophical kind'.

Still, to avid readers of the 1940-50s, and to many lesser writers whose
names are better-known, the works of Olaf Stapledon represent the zenith
of imaginative conception; especially those two which together encompass
the whole cosmos in a mind-blowing panorama of 'future history' — Last
and First Men and Star Maker. On both sides of the Atlantic, these unique
fantasies were regarded with veneration and their author as a master fit to
rank with Wells himself, if not to replace him as the new peer of the literature.

Nor was this adulation confined to the inveterate readers of science fiction,
of whose existence Stapledon remained unaware for several years after his
first major work had been acclaimed by the critics. Before then, he had
published two small volumes of poetry which reflected his early socialist
leanings, and the first of several non-fiction works which appeared at intervals
between his novels — if they could be described as such.

A Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, William Olaf Stapledon (he
discarded his first name) was no scientist; but he was genuinely concerned
about the proper use of science for the benefit of the community, and with
the establishment of a new social order. He spent much time lecturing
audiences, large and small, warning against the forces of reaction and censor-
ship and advocating 'intelligence and kindliness' as workable assets in the
movement towards true civilisation. If these assets were lost or destroyed, he
said, the human species 'may vanish like the mastodon'.

Born at Wirral, near Liverpool, in 1886, he had the advantage of a good
schooling, went to Oxford, and taught at Manchester Grammar School before
working in a shipping office in Port Said, where he had spent part of his
childhood. Back in England, he conducted workers' education classes at
Liverpool University until the first world war interrupted his career; though
he once confessed in a letter: 'I really have not had a career, having chopped
and changed from one thing to another without finding my feet anywhere.'
He called himself 'a born muddler'.

After the war he married an Australian girl and returned to the university
at Liverpool where he received his PhD and continued to lecture in philosophy
and psychology. He and his wife sought recreation in walking, swimming and
mountain climbing. They had two children, a son and daughter. And it was
there, in the late 1 920s, that he wrote Last and First Men: A Story of the Near
and Far Future, which he described in a preface as 'an essay in myth creation'
while denying any attempt at prophecy.

Adopting the viewpoint of an inhabitant of a distant epoch — one of the
Last Men — he projected his imaginary history of humankind over no less than
two thousand million years, to the end of recorded time. It detailed the rise
and fall of successive civilisations, during which the apes subdue the human
species and a Martian invasion provokes interplanetary conflict, ending in
man's reversion to savagery. Then a new race arises, to be ruled by giant
brains and give place to yet another breed of supermen.

At length the Fifth Men are menaced by the break-up of the Moon, com-
pelling them to migrate to Venus after a million years preparing for the move.
Finally, threatened by the extinction of the sun, the Ninth Men are specially
designed to start the colonisation of Neptune, where nine more species
evolve over the next six hundred million years before their story ends. Not
on a pessimistic note, entirely; for the Last Men, faced with spiritual dis
solution, are still intent on scattering the seed of their kind into space to
root in some distant galaxy. And if it should perish, as it must eventually,
'it is very good to have been man.'

No summary can do justice to the absorbing detail with which, in crystal-
clear prose, Stapledon conveyed his amazing conceptions, not only of alien
environments and bizarre mutations, but of the psychological and sexual
attitudes implicit in the structure of his mythical societies. In this respect
the book was refreshingly different from the bulk of current American science
fiction ; yet its substance was essentially similar, and its scope as ambitious
as anything ever attempted before then. Though there were, perhaps, faint
echoes of the French astronomer Camille Flammarion's classic Omega: The
Last Days of the World, in which the last man and woman find refuge on
Jupiter before the sun goes out.

When Last and First Men hit the literary headlines in 1930, JB Priestley
pronounced it 'far and away the best book of this kind in our time ... a
masterpiece.' The following year it saw publication in the USA, where the
noted radio commentator and writer Elmer Davis hailed it as 'the boldest
and most imaginative book of our times.' In Amazing Stories, literary editor
CA Brandt also noted it as 'worth careful study ... a masterpiece in the realm
of scientific fiction.'

By 1 932 it had been supplemented, here, by Last Men in London, in which
the author adopted the same remote Neptunian viewpoint to tell what was,
in the main, a more down-to-earth stoiy based^ on his own experiences,
especially during the war when he served in France in the Friends' Ambulance
Unit, a non-combatant contingent. After the near-limitless vistas of the earlier
book, this more introspective narrative seemed like an anti-climax. But to
those who persisted it presented a fascinating picture of the life and customs
of future man, his science and philosophy, as retailed by the 20,000-year-old
Explorer of the Human Past.

In the account of his manipulation of the pacifist Paul as he grows from
boyhood to maturity, Stapledon subtly revealed his own attitude to every
aspect of life, from politics to sex ; and at the end the emergence of a potential
superior species, typified by one of Paul's pupils, hints at the story of Odd John
which followed in 1935.

Opening this 'story between jest and earnest,' the author did not disguise
the fact that it had been inspired by JD Beresford's classic account of The
Hampdenshire Wonder, which dates back to 1911. Adopting this time a
straightforward novel approach, he produced a thoroughly entertaining tale
on a theme which has since been developed by many writers. Essentially,
however, it reflected the author's constant preoccupation with 'the true life

of the spirit'; though even the enlightened mutant himself cannot define
precisely what that implies.

In Sirius (1944), Stapledon returned to the super-being theme, but instead
of a boy with extra-sensory powers the prodigy is a dog, who retains his
canine instincts while growing in mind and spirit — and at length consorting
with the girl who raised him. In the view of many critics, this 'fantasy of love
and discord' represents Stapledon at his best as a novelist.

But for sheer imaginative power and original conception nothing can
compare with his 'cosmological fantasy' Star Maker, which appeared in 1 937.
In the author's own words, in a letter written just prior to its publication : 'Star
Maker is, I fear, a much wilder and more remote and philosophical work
(than Last and First Men). Probably it will be my last fantastic book.' And,
for his publisher's catalogue, he wrote his own blurb which summed up the
vast extent of the work in 1 00 words :

'An imaginary exploration of the cosmos reveals the history of life and
mind in our galaxy and throughout the swarm of galaxies. After tracing the
fortunes of many non-human intelligent races in remote planetary systems,
the story tells of the dire events which preceded the foundation of a utopian
Society of Worlds in our galaxy; of the desperate struggle between this
Society and another order of intelligence; of the belated emergence of an
imperfect and shortlived cosmical mind; of the strange relations between
this spatio-temporal cosmos of ours and its ungodly creator; and of his
many other creations.'

Reviewing Star Maker in Scientifiction, John Beynon Harris summed it
up even more succinctly: '. . . it is the life-story of Life.' And to read it is the
experience of a lifetime. If Stapledon had written nothing else, he might still
have justified his place in science fiction's hierarchy. His approach was that
of the philosopher rather than the teller of tales; yet he told an engrossing
story in which the hero was no super-scientist or conquering spaceman but
the entire species of Man.

What puzzled his most ardent readers was that he knew nothing of Ameri-
can science fiction until 1936, when the Liverpool writer Eric Frank Russell
introduced him to the pulp magazines. His reaction was one of surprise that
so much was being done along the lines he had been pursuing quite inde-
pendently. Though he found some of the ideas they offered 'very striking
and vividly treated,' he thought 'the human side was generally terribly crude,
especially the love interest.'

How did he come by his own wealth of ideas which he treated so differently ?
He confessed : 'The general plan of Last and First Men came in a flash as I
was watching seals from the cliffs of Anglesea. Afterwards I simply pumped
all my scientific friends for all the information I needed.'

'He admitted to being influenced by the ideas of Gerald Heard, the science
writer who later moved to California and produced that remarkable novel,
Doppelgangers (1947). He also adapted some of the notions of Professor
JD Bernal, who in the 1920s envisaged whole societies being transported
through space on miniature planets. By the time Star Maker appeared,
Stapledon had joined the British Interplanetary Society, but it was not until
1948 that he was persuaded to lecture them on 'Interplanetary Man'. The
occasion gave many of his disciples their only chance to see and hear the
smiling, mild-mannered man with greying hair and twinkling blue eyes who
Arthur C Clarke has described as 'one of the most civilised men of our time'.

Repeated attempts by at least one editor to induce Stapledon to write
for a science fiction magazine all proved futile, however. His excuse was that
his mind did not run along the lines of short stories; but some of his later
novels made very slim volumes. Shortest of all is Old Man in New World
(1944), which looked forward to a world state in the 1970s. Two years
earlier, Darkness and the Light suggested the prospect of two alternative
futures for mankind, with communism as the dark menace.

In Death into Life (1946), he re-explored the past, present and future
through the ubiquitous 'spirit of man'. More mystical than scientific, this
'fantasia' contained only faint reflections of his first tremendous work. The
Flames (1 947), another short novel, relies on the pleasant fancy that sentient
life-forms native to the sun and stranded on Earth might be revived through
atomic fission to become spiritual guides to blundering mankind— a theme
by no means new to science fiction. But it did little more than underline the
author's previous statements on what he called 'the tragic disorder of our
whole terrestrial hive'.

His last novel, A Man Divided (1950), published shortly before his death
at the age of 64, is mainly interesting as providing further insight into Staple-
don's own personality and the shaping of his philosophy. Though ostensibly
the tale of a man of dual personality who is influenced by a vvoman with
psychic powers, it clearly derives from his own varied experience and his
efforts to resolve his intellectual conflicts.

Even more enlightening is the posthumous work. The Opening of the Eyes,
which was completed for publication in 1954 by his widow, Agnes, who is
still active in her eighties. In the words of his lifelong friend Dr EV Rieu, in a
preface to the book, it describes how Stapledon had 'reached the goal of
his thinking' and 'come to terms with reality' shortly before he died. His
conclusioa was that, although God might be an illusion, 'Without the fiction
of your existence, I am no more than a reflex animal and the world is dust.'

The Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon

These are given in chronological order, as published in the UK. Dates in
brackets indicate subsequent or sole publication in the USA. Paperback
editions are not listed.

1 930 (1 931 ) : Last and First Men. 1 932 : Last Men in London. 1 935 (1 936) :
Odd John*. 1937: Star Maker. 1942 (1973): Darkness and the Light.
1944: Old Man in New World. 1944: Sirius. 1946: Death into Life. 1947:
The Flames. 1950: A Man Divided.

♦Included in Novels of Science (1945), ed. Donald A Wollheim.

Collections:

(1949) : Worlds of Wonder {The Flames, Death into Life, Old Man in New
World).

(1 953) : To the End of Time : The Best of Olaf Stapledon, ed. Basil Davenport
{Last and First Men, Star Maker, Odd John, Sirius, The Flames).

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 9

Chris Bent

'But one thing is certain. Man himself,
at the very least, is music, a brave theme
that makes music also of its vast ac-
companiment, its matrix of storms and
stars.' Olaf Stapledon ends his great
masterpiece LAST AND FIRST MEN
with this statement and it is the same
theme that runs through this short story.
A WORLD OF SOUND is something
of a collectors' item since it is the first
short story Stapledon ever wrote (he
only wrote two) and has only appeared
In print once before, in 1937.

T he room was overcrowded and stuffy.
The music seemed to have no intellig-
ible form. It was a mere jungle of
noise. Now one instrument and now another
blared out half a tune, but every one of these
abortive musical creatures was killed before
it had foimd its legs. Some other and hostile
beast fell upon it and devoured it, or the
whole jungle suffocated it.

The strain of following this struggle for
existence wearied me. I closed my eyes, and
must have fallen asleep; for suddenly I
woke with a start. Or seemed to wake.
Something c^eer had happened. The music
was still going on, but I was paralysed. I
could not open my eyes. I could not shout
for help. I could not move my body, nor feel
it. I had no body.

Something had happened to the music too,
and to my hearing. But what? The tissue of
sounds seemed to have become incomparab-
ly more voluminous and involved. I am not
musical; but suddenly I realised that this
music had overflowed, so to speak, into all
the intervals between the normal semitones,
that it was using not merely quartertones but
‘centitones’ and ‘millitones’, with an effect
that would surely have been a torture to the
normal ear. To me, in my changed state, it
gave a sense of richness, solidity and vitality
quite lacking in ordinary music. This queer
music, moreover, had another source of
wealth. It reached up and down over scores
of octaves beyond the range of normal
hearing. Yet I could hear it.

As I listened, I grew surprisingly accus-
tomed to this new jargon. I found myself
easily distinguishing all sorts of coherent
musical forms in this world of sound. Against
an obscure, exotic background of more or
less constant chords and fluttering ‘leafage’,
so to speak, several prominent and ever-
changing soimd-figures were playing. Each

10 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

was a persistent musical object, though
fluctuating in detail of gesture and sometimes
ranging bodily up or down the scale.

Suddenly I made a discovery which should
have been incredible, yet it seemed to me
at the time quite familiar and obvious. I
foimd myself recognising that these active
soimd-figures were alive, even intelligent.
In the normal world, living things are per-
ceived as changing patterns of visible and
tangible characters. In this mad world,
which was coming to seem to me quite
homely, patterns not of colour and shape but
of sound formed the perceptible bodies of
living things. When it occurred to me that I
had fallen into a land of ‘programme music’
I was momentarily disgusted. Here was a
whole world that violated the true canons of
musical art! Then I reminded myself that
this music was not merely telling but actually
living its story. In fact it was not art but life.
So I gave rein to my interest.

Observing these creatures that disported
themselves before me, I discovered, or
rather re-discovered, that though this world
had no true space, such as we perceive by
sight and touch, yet it did have a sort of
space. For in some sense these living things
were moving in relation to me and in relation
to one another. Apparently the ‘space’ of
this world consisted of two dimensions only,
and these differed completely in quality.
One was the obvious dimension of tonality,
or pitch, on the subtle ‘keyboard’ of this
world. 'The other was perceived only in-
directly. It corresponded to the heard near-
ness or remoteness of one and the same
instrument in the normal world. Just as we
see things as near and far through the sig-
nification of colour and perspective, so in
this strange world, certcun characters of
timbre, of harmonics, of overtones, conveyed
a sense of ‘nearness’; others a sense of

‘distance’. A peculiar blatancy, often com-
bined with loudness, meant ‘near’ ; a certain
flatness or ghostliness of timbre, generally
combined with faintness, meant ‘far’. An
object receding in this ‘level’ dimension (as
I called it) would gradually lose its full-
bodied tirnbre, and its detail and precise-
ness. At the same time it would become
fainter, and at last inaudible.

I should add that each sound-object had
also its own characteristic timbre, almost as
though each thing in this world were a theme
played by one and the same instrument. But
I soon discovered that in the case of living
things the timbre-range of each individu^
was very wide ; for emotional changes
might be accompanied by changes of timbre
even greater than those which distinguish
our instruments.

In contrast with the variegated but almost
changeless backgroimd or landscape, the
living things were in constant movement.
Always preserving their individuality, their
basic identity of tonal pattern, they would
withdraw or approach in the ‘level’ dimen-
sion, or run up or down the scale. They also
indulged in a ceaseless rippling play of
musical gesture. Very often one of these
creatures, travelling up or down the scale,
would encounter another. Then either the
two would simply interpenetrate and cross
one another, as transverse trains of waves
on a pond ; or there would be some sort of
mutu^ re-adjustment of form, apparently
so as to enable them to squeeze past one
another without ‘collision’. And collision in
this world seemed to be much like disso-
nance in our music. Sometimes, to avoid
collision, a creature needed merely to effect
a slight alteration in its tonal form, but some-
times it had to move far aside, so to speak,
in the other dimension, which I have called
the ‘level’ dimension. Thus it became for a

while inaudible.

Another discovery now flashed upon me,
again with curious familiarity. I myself had a
‘body’ in this world. This was the ‘nearest’
of all the soimd-objects. It was so ‘near’ and
so pbvious that I never noticed it till it was
brought into action. This happened un-
expectedly. One of the moving creatures in-
advertently came into collision with a minor
part of my musical body. The slight violation
of my substance stabbed me with a little
sharp pain. Immediately, by reflex action
and then purposefully, I readjusted my
musical shape, so as to avoid further conflict.
Thus it was that I discovered or re-dis-
covered the power of voluntary action in this
world.

I also emitted a loud coruscation of musical
gesture, which I at once knew to be signifi-
cant speech. In fact I said in the language of
that world, ‘Damn you, that’s my toe, that
was.’ There came from the other an answer-
ing and apologetic murmur.

A newcomer now approached from the

silent distance to join my frolicking com-
panions. This being was extremely attractive
to me, and poignantly familiar. Her lithe
figure, her lyrical yet faintly satirical move-
ment, turned the jungle into Arcadia. To my
delight I found that I was not unknown to her,
and not wholly unpleasing. With a gay
gesture she beckoned me into the game.

For the first time I not only changed the
posture of my musical limbs but moved
bodily, both in the dimension of pitch and
the ‘level’ dimension. As soon as I ap-
proached, she slipped with laughter away
from me. I followed her; but very soon she
vanished into the jxmgle and into the remote-
ness of silence. Naturally I determined to
pursue her. I could no longer live without
her. And in the exquisite harmony of our
two natures I imagined wonderful creative
potentialities.

Let me explain briefly the method and
experience of locomotion in this world. I
foimd that, by reaching out a musical limb
and knitting its extremity into the soimd-
pattern of some fixed object at a distance, in
either dimension or both, I obtained a pur-
chase on the object, and could draw, my
whole body toward it. I could then reach
out another limb to a still farther point. Thus
I was able to climb about the forest of sound
with the speed and accuracy of a gibbon.
Whenever I moved, in either dimension, I
experienced my movement merely as a
contrary movement of the world around me.
Near objects became nearer, or less near;
remote objects became less remote, or
slipped further into the distance and vanish-
ed. Similarly my movement up or down the
musical scale appeared to me as a deepening
or heightening of the pitch of all other
objects.

In locomotion I experienced no resistance
from other objects save in the collision of dis-

sonance, which I could generally avoid by
altering my shape. I discovered that a
certain degree of dissonance between my-
self and another offered only very slight
resistance and no pain. Indeed, such con-
tacts might be pleasurable. But harsh dis-
cords were a torture and could not be
maintained.

I soon found that there was a limit to my
possible movement up and down the scale.
At a point many octaves below my normal
situation I began to feel oppressed and slug-
gish. As I toUed downwards my discomfort
increased, until, in a sort of swoon, I floated
up again to my native musical plane. Ascen-
ding far above this plane, I felt at first ex-
hilaration; but after many octaves a sort of
light-headedness and vertigro overtook me,
and presently I sank reeling to the few
octaves of my normal habitat.

In the ‘level’ dimension there seemed to
be no limit to my power of locomotion, and
it was in this dimension chiefly that I sought
the vanished nymph. I pressed forward

through ever-changing tonal landscapes.
Sometimes they opened out into ‘level’ vistas
of remote, dim, musical objects, or into
‘tonal’ vistas, deep and lofty, revealing
hundreds of octaves above and below me.
Sometimes the view narrowed, by reason
of the dense musical ‘vegetation’, to a mere
tunnel, no more than a couple of octaves in
height. Only with difficulty could I work my
way along such a passage. Sometimes, in
order to avoid impenetr^le objects I had
to clamber far into the treble or the bass.
Sometimes, in empty regions, I had to leap
from perch to perch.

At last I began to weary. Movement be-
came repugnant, perception imcertain.
Moreover the very form of my body lost
something of its pleasant fullness. Instinct
now impelled me to an act which surprised
my intellect though I performed it without
hesitation. Approaching certain luscious
little musical objects, certain very simple but
vigorous little enduring patterns of timbre
and harmony, I devoured them. That is, I
broke down the sound-pattern of each one
into simpler patterns ; and these I incorpor-
ated into my own harmonious form. Then I
passed on, refreshed.

Presently I was confronted by a crowd of
the intelligent beings tumbling helter skelter
towards me, and jostling one another in their
haste. Their emotional timbre expressed
such fear and horror that my own musical
form was infected with it. Hastily moving
myself several octaves toward the bass to
avoid their frantic course, which was mostly
in the treble, I shouted to them to tell me
what was the matter. As they fled past I
distinguished only a cry which might be
translated, ‘The Big Bad Wolf’.

My fear left me, for now I recognised that
this was a flock of very young creatures. So
I laughed reassuringly, and asked if they had

encountered the lovely being whom I was
seeking. And I laughed to myself at the ease
and sweetness with which her musical name
came to me when I needed it. They answered
only with an augmented scream of infantile
grief, as they faded into the distance.

Disturbed, I pursued my journey. Present-
ly I came into a great empty region where I
could hear a very remote but ominous growl.
I halted, to listen to the thing more clearly.
It was approaching. Its form emerged from
the distcuice and was heard in detail. Soon 1
recognised it as no mere childish bogey
but a huge and ferocious brute. With lum-
bering motion in the bass, its limbs propelled
it at a surprising speed. Its harsh tentacles
of sound, flickering hither and thither far up
into the treble, nosed in search of prey.

Realising at last the fate that had probably
befallen my dear companion, I turned sick
with horror. My whole musical body tremb-
led and wavered with faintness.

Before I had decided what to do, the brute
caught sight of me, or rather sound of me.

and came poimding toward me with the roar
and scream of a train, or an approaching
shell. I fled. But soon realising that I was los-
ing ground, I plimged into a thicket of
chaotic sound, which I heard ahead of me
and well up in the treble. Adapting my
musical form and colour as best I could to
the surrounding wilderness, I continued to
climb. Thus I hoped both to conceal myself
and escape from the reach of the creature’s
tentacles. Almost fainting from the altitude,*
I chose a perch, integrating my musical
limbs with the pattern of the fixed objects in
that locality. Thus anchored, I waited,
motionless.

The brute was now moving more slowly,
nosing in search of me as it approached.
Presently it lay immediately below me, far
down in the bass. Its body was now all too
clearly heard as a grim cacophony of grow-
ling and belching. Its strident tentacles
moved beneath me like the waving tops of
trees beneath a man clinging to a cliff-face.
Still searching, it passed on beneath me.
Such was my relief that I lost consciousness
for a moment emd slipped several octaves
down before I could recover myself. The
movement revealed my position. The beast
of prey returned, and began clambering
awkwardly toward me. Altitude soon check-
ed its progress, but it reached me with one
tentacle, one shrieking arpeggio. Desperate-
ly I tried to withdraw myself farther into the
treble, but the monster’s limb knit itself into
the sound-pattern of my flesh. Frantically
struggling, I was dragged down, down into
the siiffocating bass. There, fangs and talons
of soimd tore me agonisingly limb from limb.

Then suddenly I woke in the concert hall
to a great confusion of scraping chairs. The
audience was making ready to leave,

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 11

The history of the science fiction magazine in England has been
somewhat erratic; magazines have appeared and disappeared at
irregular intervals leaving great gaps which usually instigated
withdrawal symptoms in sf addicts. To fill these gaps sf fans
have come together in various parts of the country at various
times and produced their own magazines. In this instance science
fiction reveals itself as an almost unique form of literature being
perhaps the only genre to invite such an enthusiastic response
from its fans. In this series of articles we’ve asked ‘fanzine’
editors to talk about themselves and their magazines in the hope
that the ‘fanzine’ will be brought more sharply into focus.

FftNZINES IN FOCUS

PeterWeston and Speculation

YOU SUDDENLY see a fanzine and think. My God ! I must do one !' — Peter Weston reminiscing on
how it all started. Today Speculation, several times Hugo nominee. Nova 1973 and Europa 1972 awards winner, is
' arguably the best science fiction fanzine produced in England. Containing articles, book reviews, discussions with writers,
letters etc. Speculation is one of the most easily accessible fanzines for the newcomer, and the one in which he is most
likely to find familiar material.

Inspiration came to Peter Weston, founder and editor of Speculation, in the shape of a grubby little green thing which
went by the name of Les Spinge (from the habit of certain Stourbridge fans who went round poking each other and saying
'Spinge !!!!'); although 'terribly amateurish' by today's standards, this publication, the first fanzine Peter Weston had
ever seen, fired his imagination and infused him with a desire to produce his own magazine. As he says:

'I spent the next three months working on a fanzine which was to contain articles and reviews by fellow-members of the
Erdington Science Fiction Circle (I'd been a member of this group for about six months) all four of us writing little essays
on the books we liked.'

The first issue was done on a Banda Duplicator at the company Peter was then working for; it was very small, purple and
indecipherable. As he admits:

'It was a typical first issue; every editor has the first issue blues, or in my case purples. The first issue.of almost every
fanzine is something people are slightly ashamed of and nostalgic for, and which they prefer not to show to people. After
that you start getting things right.'

In fact Pete reckons he did things completely the wrong way round. According to him one should first join sf fandom,
read other fanzines for a couple of years, and then see where there's a gap in the field. What he did was start entirely from
scratch, making his own contacts, finding his own contributors and learning the rules as he went along.

Zenith (as the fanzine was first called) coincided with a lull in sf both in England and the USA, so Pete can claim to have
been the only person in the world publishing an amateur science fiction orientated magazine at that time. Also Zenith
was revolutionary in that it was the first English fanzine to take advertising. In the fifth issue Peter Weston had an advert
from Four Square Books which enabled him to include a very attractive Eddie Jones wash painting as a black and white
half-tone wrap-around. As he recalls, in its first year Zenith beat all English fanzine records for appearance.

Financial independence is another of Zenith /Speculation's attributes. Peter Weston started selling his fanzine at the
'ridiculous' price of 1 /- each, and six for 5/-, but escalation came in quite quickly. Since Zenith was what is known as a
'sercon' — a serious and constructive publication about sf — and was aimed at a broad spectrum, as well as being easily
accessible, it quickly gained a lot of readers. It went on sale publicly in Birmingham (smashing all sorts of taboos in the
process) through Pete actually delivering them to bookstalls by hand. Initially Pete found the fanzine dug deep into his
apprentice's pay, 300 copies of 50 pages each produced on a duplicator, along with postage and envelopes not coming
cheap even then. But, as he says:

'Bread cast on the waters then is coming back a thousandfold. After ten years of very hard work Speculation is now
paying off tremendously.' From issue six onwards Zenith had more USA subscribers than British ones, simply because
there are more fans there. Today two-thirds go to the USA.

In contrast to most fanzines which usually run to roughly 1 00 copies each issue, Peter Weston immediately aimed at an
ambitious number — 1 50, rising quickly to 200 and 300. From issue ten he was restricting circulation to 500 — the maximum
he felt he could handle, since production was always a nightmare:

'Production problems fade into a sort of limbo. Every issue has been an agony. There are 20,000 sheets of paper to be
put through a Gestetner Duplicator which invariably goes wrong half way. There's been a special disaster issue in which
every single thing went wrong, and a blood -spattered issue where I caught my thumb on the stapling machine — nasty!
and an issue in which the ink looked all right when printed but never actually driedV

Starting with no experience, Pete Weston has had to cope with the problems of finding duplicators, cutting stencils,

(wax ones at first), designing layouts, typing and collating as well as the actual collecting, writing and editing of the
material. In the early days Zenith was one of the best laid-out fanzines, but now Pete says he would rather spend time on
getting good material to read and drop the accent on illustration and presentation.

Sources and contacts can be regarded as the life-blood of any fanzine. Pete Weston considers himself very fortunate in
that he has been able to establish such good contacts over the last ten years:

'If there's one thing I feel proud of in my time in sf it's that I have been responsible for bringing in and helping to bring
in a lot of good people to sf fandom.'

He has also done a lot of promotional work to get outside fandom, such as putting ads in The Writer, New Worlds and
International Times', from these and other diverse sources he's drawn people like Jack Cohen, Mark Adlard and Tom
Shipley, and has therefore always been able to include quite a high proportion of professional content in Speculation.

Fanzine production is of course a spare time activity for the majority of editors, but it is a full time interest as Pete
admits, taking in friends, hobbies, holidays and family:

'I've worked hard for ten years and Speculation is a success, and although I'm not entirely the serious young sf student
I was, it is still one of my prime reasons for living T

As well as producing Speculation, Pete writes for other publications, organises sf cons, and runs the Birmingham Science
Fiction Group which he relaunched in 1 971 . This activity in the fan world has meant a drop in Speculation issues. Whereas
he used to be able to bring out four or five issues annually, he has not been able to produce an issue now for over a year.

This by no means infers that Speculation is dead— far from it ! The fanzine is Pete's first love and he fully intends to keep it
going. (Meanwhile readers please note that Pete is up to his eyebrows in a new house, a new baby and a new job, but
only a rapidly dwindling supply of Speculations. Hopefully a new issue will appear soon so keep your eyes peeled and your
enquiries till later!)

Pete finds that doing everything himself is the only way to produce the fanzine ; otherwise he loses the sense of personal
involvement. As far as he's concerned it's a one man band except for the collation. As he says :

'Putting pages in order and stapling them has been known to cause madness !' Fortunately he has enlisted the willing
labour of Bob Rickard and the Aston University sf Group in this matter.

Science Fiction has come a long way since the days when enthusiasts like Peter Weston had to apply direct to the Post
Master General for permission to spend fifteen bob of the country's money on American sf books. One of the reasons for
this change is the host of sf fanzines now available, with Speculation in the foreground, which offer readers informed
discussion on all matters sf. Roll on the next issue ! Aune R Butt

12 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

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gh

ve

said

lUMMlWOO

aft^oo^a|
'You krieJH
iuQDatient, thbi

one of tJh© three small screens
on Miihammed Remnov's desk'
pu^a.' Remnov, Programme
Galentic
of|itt^^i|§tant,
on the scre^,

re-run XTOnqU^ of Etarnit^-:^
.aaidt^ithout preli napty- Ml.

(ft^v liked as any

loyee, BuT^
t bs. pr evibusPif. It.
'‘ourfsl^wjnbtl^^ have
lantic 3y ri^
'Anything 3»lse?'

gs

warte
i© lisre on

I't.' Remnov was becoming
he was doing his best not to
Didn't the man know he had work to do ?
'Tor Carserr!'

'Who?-

'Jpr Carsen, sir. He was with the first team to
land on Elysium.' Atinga smiled.

'Are you sure ?'

'Positive.'

'What's he doing here?'

'Why does anyone come to Elysium ?'

'No,' said Remnov slowly. 'I don't think so. He
was too old for that.' He paused. 'It was almost
fifty standard years ago. I though they were all —
er — dead by now, the ones who arrived first.
Killed by the beasts, or else . . .'

Jhere was no need for him to say what used
appen, and Remnov tried not to think about it.
h t,' said Atinga, 'we could show
Conqua^oi^l^ity and then get Carsen to
comment on Jfr«lk,about his own experiences
atTd hq^fi^«ta|^ed to survive.'

Remnov said ; 'Go ahead.'

the

‘^aiaxy waSirt iKn

ingwhat the/difMi^ ai^ there watfid
'p therh. The compaftiei ; ' ’
fph to not caring who OH'

'^riothe^HBHHHBRthat

carrieti
what

sF

wasn't,

Not%hi^^

— and tf
Galen
them off
News of tl
had a hmf
ith suspehiipril
Moon, Gi
observ

Galentic

under-siaffe
and oua^res
Srredl^^ffi
have ono^ its licence Tsacl
could have chartered a vessef td
Galentic's planet. ^

Carsen and Hassan knew they'd receive very
little help from Galentic, and that they were
regarded as hostile intruders. Perhaps the
company couldn't be blamed, thought Carsen.
After all, they had discovered the planet and
certainly held some claim to it. But they had to
realise they couldn't get away with anything and
everything. Far too much had been lost forever in
the previous half centur^of uncontrolled
expansion. If this who would tell what

the next fifty years wolW bring ?

If the companies wouldn't co-operate, then
threats and persuasion would have to be used
until they did. Surely they could understand that
it was possible to act responsibly and still make
money. In most cases the Department was
perfectly willing to let the traders do as they liked.
That was because most worlds were both
uninhabited and uninhabitable.

fsen.

With

an

liitioto t

that if we thin
iQ, we'll sootT?

and

un

ei

coowaa

efe.ftment

elc^fib to Heaven, gentlemen,'
said Nevll Polimoto, the top Galentic
man on this worid.
joke?’ said Aiax Hassan, accepting
fetched hard.

them once Ae
:^e can't keep
’ Tlgo for a quick

ly, thought
Maybe he
shpwn us

ay again. But Carsen
pfe as that,
off the Galentic
jther had time to form
ish sun ; warm climate ;
eeze; undulating fertile
-Snd kilometres of grass,
aquamarine sea. The men
ad named it Heaven, and at
asn't hard to see why.
idrt 'Galentic had pre|
elevant facts and fi
a tenth of Heaven was la
larger than ^ fgyy H
Instead the-:
tinyisIandisf/‘'
less crowded thad^

There was bo
planet's inhabitants
because he knew Gi
covering up somethi
'How are you plann
world ?' Hassan deman
down in the floater,

'We have a choice of several wivl _„

Polimoto mildly. 'It takes a lot of wurkiBjSeci
which combination will be the most re'

Tim White

if, indeed, any.'

The freighter had landed near the coast, away
from the company's main base. Galentic's
headquarters had been established inland on one
of the largest islands, but it was towards the sea
that Polimoto steered the unwheeled vehicle.

'You mean,' said Hassan, 'there mightn't be
anything you can make money out of?'

'Very few companies pull out of any world,'
Polimoto told him. 'We usually find something we
can sell ... to someone . . . somewhere.'

Hassan frowned disapprovingly.

'What about the natives ?' said Carsen.

A full report of two years' Investigation into
the commercial possibilities of GX- 118 follows,
but / would like to summarise briefly the
position regarding the indigenous population.

Our linguist can communicate with the
natives, although they show a lack of enthusiasm
for work and almost no interest in us. There is
much we could trade to them, but they have
nothing to offer in return: no craftwork or curios,
for example. They do not seem to understand the
idea of barter, which indicates a very low level
of development. Yet as you are well aware, it must
be determined — according to the Department
of Extra-Terrestrial Affairs — if the natives are
intelligent and therefore whether we have to
bargain with them for development rights. This
seems ludicrous, as they show absolutely no
inclination to have anything to do with us.

/ have received your warning about the arrival
of the two BETA men, and shall proceed as
instructed. / will keep you informed of their
behaviour and reactions. Should things not turn
out as anticipated, / would appreciate further
orders as to how they should be dealt with.

N o,' said Polimoto in reply to Carsen's
query. 'We've had no illnesses of any
sort And before Mr Hassan asks the
obvious, we haven't infected the natives with
any Terran diseases. The doctor tells me that if
anything we're healthier than when we arrived.
Clean air and good food, I guess.'

Carsen nodded. 'You could always turn it into
a resort world.'

'Don't give him ideas,' said Hassan.

'Don't panic,' said Polimoto. 'We're already
considering such a scheme.'

Carsen finished his meal and pushed the plate
to one side. 'Very good. Local ?'

'Yes, from the sea.'

'A great asset the sea,' said Carsen, 'if you're
"planning a tourist planet. And you've got the
climate for it Healthy, too. No hostile creatures.
Friendly natives. They are friendly?'

Polimoto nodded, still chewing on a thick
chunk of white fish.

It was their second day on Heaven, and both
days had been crowded. Polimoto had seemed
only too pleased to help them and go wherever
they wanted; he hadn't even appointed a
subordinate as a guide, preferring to act as host
himself. That way he could keep both eyes on his
unwelcome guests all the time.

'It's a wonder you don't have them serving you
at the table,' Hassan commented sourly, that
being his appointed role.

'If we could, perhaps,' answered Polimoto,
smiling. 'But that fish you've eaten was caught by
us, not by the natives. They catch fish, of course,
but they won't trade with us.'

'Could it be,' said Hassan 'that you have
nothing they want?'

Polimoto shook his head. 'They're just stupid.'

'I don't think so. That they can find their way
amongst so many islands indicates some
intelligence, at least.'

'Birds migrate.'

'But these people use boats,' continued
Hassan. 'Catamarans with sails. Of course they're
intelligent. They’re human. They're almost
exactly like you and me. You can tell that by
looking at them.'

'They’re not human. They might have been
once, but not any more.' Polimoto filled his glass
to the brim with pale wine, adding ; 'Don't be
deceived by appearances.'

Carsen and Hassan had seen quite a few of the
natives during the day. All had been small and
light-skinned, but so were many Earthmen. It
seemed as though Galentic had found a world it
would have to surrender. If these people were
still developing, there must be no outside
interference.

'They don't make fires,' went on Polimoto.
'They eat raw food.'

'So did your ancestors,' Carsen told him. 'Tell
me: Have any of your men tried the native
women ?''

Hassan stared at him in disbelief, but the
younger man ignored him. 'Have they?'

Polimoto shrugged, then nodded. 'I've had to

discipline one or two of them. You know what it's
like, and no one wants to have to take the pills.'

'What did they say about it?' asked Carsen.

'Or didn't they like discussing rape?'

Polimoto knew he couldn't get out of
answering. 'They said the women didn't seem to
know what was happening.'

'Any offspring ?'

'Of course not.'

'Why "of course" ?'

'You seen any children while you've been here ?'
They both said they hadn’t.

'Nor have I,' said Polimoto, 'and I've been here
two years. It's another example of why they're
a dying race. They never make new canoes, just
use old ones; they patch up old nets until they're
in shreds, but they don't seem to know how to
replace them; they live in ancient, tumbledown
huts. We held a rough census, and there are less
than 30,000 of them on the whole planet. And
not one child. They're on the brink of extinction.'

'I didn’t see anyone who was young,' said
Carsen, 'but nor did I see anyone who was old.'

Polimoto's thick eyebrows rose, then fell as he
frowned. He and Carsen simply looked at each
other.

Hassan broke the silence. 'You realise what
this probably means ? No one old, no one young.'
Then he told them.

I t took only a few days before Hassan's
hypothesis was proved beyond doubt: The
natives of Heaven were immortal, and it was
the waters of their planet which made them so.

'We'll all be millionaires,' said Polimoto over
his celebrationary tumbler of vodka, referring to
Galentic's profit-sharing bonuses. 'Even you.'

Hassan shook his head, and Carsen said : 'I
don't think so.'

The other man looked surprised. 'But if it
hadn't been for you two, it might have been
years before we realised the truth.'

'You can't bribe us, Polimoto,' Hassan told
him.

'It's no bribe !' said Polimoto harshly,
slamming down his glass. Almost at once there
was silence in the mess hall as the Galentic men
watched their chief confront the DETA pair.
Suddenly Polimoto laughed, a short humourless

laugh. 'Okay,' he said, draining what he hadn't
spilled. 'If that's how you want it, it's your hard
luck.'

'What will happen now?' asked Carsen.

'Isn't it obvious ?’

'Not to me.’

'This is the greatest thing in the whole
Universe !' said Polimoto, stretching out his arms
as if to demonstrate the magnitude of the
Universe. 'To be able to live forever, barring
accidents — and even now it has to be a very bad
accident for transplants and prosthetics not to
keep anyone alive. You ask what'll happen ? We'll
start to export immortality, that's what !'

'What about investigations into side-effects?'
said Hassan.

'That's not up to me. And anyway, what
possible bad effects are there to living forever?'

'Think of the people here,' said Hassan, 'and
how they've stagnated. You said yourself they
were a dying race.'

'Or if they're not dying,' added Carsen, 'they
soon will be if you start taking the water. Cultural
shock.'

'Cultural shit,' said Polimoto, and he walked
away.

'We can't let them do it,' said Hassan.

'No. But maybe they’ll discover what's so
special about the water and be able to synthesise
it.'

The other man nodded. 'It must have happened
recently — within the last few thousand years —
or else the natives would never have evolved this
far. A meteor from another galaxy dissolving in
the ocean, perhaps.'

Carsen was more concerned about the
consequences than the reason. How could they
contact the Department? Polimoto claimed that
the base's hypertype machine was out of order.

It was probably a lie. There was no other means
of communicating with Earth, and the only way
to leave Heaven was by Galentic ship. And
Carsen knew Polimoto wouldn't let them leave.

O ne of the geologists shook him

awake and said : 'You'd better follow
me.'

Still half-asleep and undressed, Carsen
followed the man outside, beyond the cluster of
prefabricated domes and down a shallow dip.

A dozen Galentic men were already there.
Polimoto came up to him, a gun in his hand.

'Hassan's dead,' he said, motioning with his
head.

Numbly, Carsen walked over to his
companion's body. Hassan lay prone on the
grass, a knife in his back. It was one of the knives

the natives used for gutting fish.

Carsen stared at the two other shapes which
lay in the hollow: small and naked and dead.

'They also got four of my men,' continued
Polimoto, 'before we caught up with them.'

Carsen turned. He knew it was a frame-up.

He started towards Polimoto. 'You liar I' he
shouted.

Before he could take another step, someone
shot him from behind. And as he fell a series of
images flickered across his mind : a prophecy
of the bloody vendetta that would follow as
thousand upon thousand of the harmless,
innocent people were slain. Harmless and
innocent, but no longer immortal.

H e'd wanted to come back to Heaven
because . . .

But it wasn't called that any more, and
it wasn't like it used to be. That 3V film they'd
shown him, they'd got it all wrong. Didn't they
know ? Why wouldn't they listen to him ? He
knew, he could remember.

Carsen peered at the interviewer again, seeing
him only dimly. The man tried not to look at him.

'Tor Carsen,' the man said. 'Tor Carsen, are
you listening to me ?'

'Yes.'

'Can you recall for us how you survived the
first savage attack from the creatures.'

'Yes, I'm listening to you.'

The man got to his feet. 'It's no good,’ he said
to someone. 'We'll have to call it off. It was a
lunatic idea. Stupid old fool. Turns my gut even
to look at him. Don't know why they allowed
him on the planet.'

'He's a hero,' said another voice.

'Some hero.'

The observers from the Department of Extra-
Terrestrial Affairs always ran certain risks, both of
death and of having their minds tampered with.
But that was in the old days — before selling
immortality had enabled Galentic to buy DETA
and its staff a thousand times over.

Carsen was lucky, he was alive. Which was
more than could be said for many others sent to
find out what Galentic were doing on the world
they later named Elysium. They'd made Carsen a
hero, having suitably edited his memory. The
interference with his brain had only half-
succeeded, but it had also half-failed. Now he'd
come back one last time, before it was too late,
to try and find the missing pieces of recollection,
to attempt to work out what had really
happened to him on the planet once called
Heaven.

He sat patiently, waiting for the man to ask his
questions. There were things he could tell,
things only he knew. Because hadn't everyone
else died before more men had come and killed
the planet's barbarous inhabitants? That was
what they'd told him, those people who'd looked
after him when he was rescued. He was the
only one left. The only one.

R emnov switched off the centre screen,
the only one of the three which still
worked.

They couldn't use the interview with Carsen —
if it could be called an interview. He felt a little
sorry for the old man, but it was the same for
anyone who’d passed puberty when Galentic had
started marketing its 20cc bottles of Aquavita.
Just like Remnov’s own parents. He hadn't any
children of his own, naturally, and neither was he
married. But that was a small price to pay for
eternity.

He looked out of the window, watching people
splashing about in the shallow waters a few
hundred metres away. When he'd first moved
into this building, the shore had seemed closer.
They'd have come dozens of parsecs just for a
paddle. What a waste, thought Remnov. Though
he was fortunate enough to work for Galentic
and live on Elysium, he'd very rarely ventured into
its life-giving waters. He preferred to take his
daily dose out of a bottle. It was much simpler.

What should he do about Conquest of
Eternity? It was a great favourite of his and
everyone else. He must have seen it fifty times :
The first landing on the planet; the meeting with
the huge, pig-faced reptilian natives ; the attempts
to negotiate with them; their treacherous attack
on the humans' camp ; how they tried to stop
mankind discovering the secret .of living forever;
how they were defeated and chose death rather
than surrender. They’d died by the thousand,
so all that remained of them were a few animated
corpses which roared and snarled in cages for
the amusement of pilgrims to Elysium.

It was a good film. An all-time best. A pity
they no longer made them like that.

Remnov came to his decision. Once every
three months wasn't too often for it to be
screened. You couldn't have too much of a good
thing.

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 17

18

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

I

iAND

INTELUGENT)

By C D Renmore

What is life? What is intelligence? Don’t worry,
I shall not attempt to answer such philosophical
questions here. Yet we all wonder at one time
or another whether there might be ‘intelligent life
as we know it’ on other worlds out there in space.

There is a very great difference between asking
whether there is life on other planets within
our own solar system, and asking whether there
could be life on planets orbiting other stars.

The question of hfe in our solar system is one
which we can expect to settle by direct
exploration before the end of the present century;
perhaps even within the next decade. But the
nearest star is thousands of times as far away
from us as the farthest planet, and this difference
of scale is crucial. From such a great distance, we
cannot even tell for certain whether the nearest
star has any planets circling it, let alone whether
any of them supports life as we know it. The
direct exploration of the stars is a totally
different sort of challenge from the exploration
of the planets. Exploring the planets is rather
like getting to know your neighbours in the
same road; going to the stars is more hke
emigrating to Australia.

To begin with, then, I shall talk about life
in our solar system. Now if you are a biologist,
you would be fascinated by the prospect of
finding even a few simple plants on Mars or
Venus. For most of us, though, the really
interesting question is whether there is a chance
of our explorers meeting inteUigent beings like
themselves with whom they can communicate.
Our unmanned interplanetary probes are at this
very moment reaching out towards the very
limits of the solar system, transmitting
information back to us for as long as their power
supplies last. Armed with this increasing
knowledge of our near neighbours in space, we
can begin our search for extraterrestrial hfe in
the confident belief that the matter will be
settled one way or the other within the next few
years.

Our solar system

We are searching for inteUigent hfe as we
know it, so it is natural to start with the
members of the sun’s family which seem most
closely to resemble the Earth: Mars and Venus.

Mars has caught the imagination of writers
ever since LoweU suggested, towards the end of
the last century, that the ‘canals’ he claimed
to have seen might be evidence of advanced hfe
on that planet. Although he has since been
discredited, the recent Mariner space probes
have found what look hke dried-up river beds,
suggesting that running water was once a feature
of the Martian surface even though it does not
appear to be so now. The atmospheric pressure
on the surface of Mars is too low to sustain the
sort of animal hfe that we see here on Earth,
although the biologists working on the Viking
mission (due to land an unmanned probe on Mars
in 1976) are planning experiments to detect
every possible manifestation of hfe as we know it.
The evidence so far does not encourage
scientists to expect advanced hfe there ; not, at
least, on the visible surface of the planet.

Venus, the evening star, presents astronomers
with greater difficulties than Mars for one very

good reason : they cannot see the surface directly.
Venus is covered by what seems to be a dense
cloud layer and wih not give up her secrets so
readily. To ‘see’ through the clouds it has been
necessary to use radar signals and ultraviolet
light.

Venus seems pretty inhospitable to hfe as we
know it. The Venus IV canister, parachuting
down to the surface of Venus in 1967, reported a
temperature of over 550° F and pressures over
twenty times as great as Earth surface
atmospheric pressure before its transmissions
ceased. Mariner X found this year that there are
traces of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere of
Venus; yet this by no means rules out the
presence of hfe in some form. Remarkable
experiments here on earth have identified
organisms which can withstand that sort of
environment !

After Mars and Venus, where shah we try
next ? How about Earth — is there intelhgent hfe
on Earth ?

Now that photographs of the Earth from space
are available, we can look at them from an
outsider’s point of view and ask : what sort of
observations, and from how far away, give
definite evidence to an observer in space that
there is indeed inteUigent hfe on Earth ? What we
are really doing here is to ask our starting
question in a back-to-front manner; and in so
doing, we can learn more about how to detect
hfe on other planets by remote measurements.

The results are very informative — and very
surprising as weU.

Carl Sagan (CorneU University) has studied
sateUite photographs of Earth and concludes that
ordinary photography shows no signs of
intelhgent hfe on Earth until featiures as smaU as
one hundred yards across can be distinguished !

This seems incredible when you think of the
size of cities, airfields and so on; but remember
that we are looking for intelligent hfe, and this
means that we need evidence of order and
pattern. Cities admittedly do show up as big
smudges on less detailed photographs, but what
does that prove ? And their hghts are visible at

night, too — but that could be due to some
chemical process, or even volcanic action. We
have to accept that ordinary photography is not
much good at detecting signs of intelhgent hfe at
long distance, which is what we are reaUy
interested in. What other indications are there
that work over interplanetary (or even better,
intersteUar) distances ?

One powerful technique for detecting hfe
(though it wiU not teU us whether that hfe is
intelhgent or not) is spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy is basic^y the study of light after
it has been spht up into its component colours by
a prism or soip^ equivalent device. From a
study of the spearum, as it is caUed, one can
find which substances are present in the source
of hght and in what quantities. The planets shine
only by reflected hght, as does the Moon, but
even so their atmospheres can be studied.

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 19

That is, if they have any atmosphere.

By looking out for the proportions (not merely
the presence) of certain specific gases associated
with the functioning of plant and animal life, it is
possible to draw some tentative conclusions
about the presence of life on the planet being
studied. These tests can be carried out on the
planets within our solar system, and so far the
indications are that only the Earth’s atmosphere
contains significant departures from chemical
equilibrium — the evidence for life. It must be
added, though, that there is a need for
improved accuracy in the measurements and it is
stiU possible that Mars or Venus have methane
or ammonia in their atmospheres, but in quantities
too small to detect at present.

This sort of test is probably limited to
distances within the solar system, and as I have
said, it does not tell us definitely whether any
life we may have detected is intelligent or not.
We need some way of telling this, and we need it
to work over the greatest possible distances —
preferably all the way to the stars. Is there any
method of detection that is so long-range and so
reliable ?

To answer this, I would like to return to a
point made earlier: the best evidence of intelligent
life is some sort of umnistakeable pattern;
something that could not by any stretch of the
imagination have occurred by chance. Suppose
for the moment that you are observing the

*Of the hundred thousand
million stars in our galaxy,
about one in a hundred
thousand would be expected to
support an advanced technical
civihsation. That means about
a million such civilisations in
existence now!’

Earth with equipment as advanced as we have
now; you are well outside the solar system, far
beyond the orbit of Pluto. It is impossible to
tell by ordinary photography whether there is
inteUigent life; the spectroscopic evidence
indicates that life of some sort is definitely
present; but what other information would you
receive ? The answer is, of course, radio signals.
Our radio transmissions are centred about
particular frequency bands and show evidence of
order that does not correspond to any simple
natural process ; they are conclusive, long-range
evidence of intelligent life. What do we find
when we turn our giant radio telescopes towards
the planets ?

The brightest object in the radio sky is the
planet Jupiter, the largest member of the sun’s
family. Its radio emissions are intense, but we
can discern no pattern, no evidence of order.
They seem to be bursts of noise — perhaps
having their origin in violent electrical storms.
Jupiter has been compared with a vast chemical
laboratory; an enormous cauldron in which
Nature experiments with mixtures which might
eventually produce life. There are belts of
intense radiation around Jupiter which would
kill a man, and which nearly burned out the
detectors on the Pioneer space probe when it
flew past the planet last December. Yet life on
Jupiter is by no means impossible, though it may
be restricted to primitive micro-organisms.
Experiments by Ponnamperuma (University of
Maryland) on simulated Jovian atmospheres
indicate that even Earth bacteria can survive for
at least a day at one hundred times normal
atmospheric pressure and in a temperature of
— 330°F. The ‘atmosphere’ in these experiments
consisted of hydrogen, methane and ammonia,
which says quite a lot for the hardiness of the
bacteria concerned.

The exploration of the outer planets and
Mercury is Well under way; all we need note
here is that conditions seem so severe that only
the most primitive organisms are likely to be
capable of surviving. There is, so far, no sign of
life as we know it. We have to admit that the
chances of finding intelligent life as we know it
in our own solar system are very remote indeed.

In that case, is there really much point in

exploring the remainder of the solar system if we
shall only find, at most, a few simple plants and
baaeria ?

The answer to that depends on the answer
to another question: are we interested in
finding out about the likelihood of life beyond
our own family of planets, out there across the
gulf between the stars ? If we are, then we must
understand as much as possible about the nature
and origin of the solar system and ourselves as
part of it. Only when we have a theory which
fits all the data for our star and our planets can
we extrapolate with confidence to other stars
and other planets.

Other solar systems

At this juncture, honesty compels me to
mention a point which is hardly ever raised in a
discussion of extraterrestrial life : we are about to
try and explain a null result, using arguments
which some scientists at least still regard as
sheer speculation. We shall be violating that
most basic of rules in science, the Razor of
Occam. According to the Razor, the simplest
(and therefore the best) explanation for observing
nothing is that there is nothing to observe. For
let us be absolutely clear on this point: there is
no direct and conclusive evidence yet that there
are any planets at all beyond our own solar
system, let alone any planets supporting
intelligent life ! Yet an increasing munber of
scientists are coming to the' view that there must
be other planets — possibly in enormous numbers
— in the Galaxy as a whole. It is our business
now to examine the groimds for that belief.

We are asking the question : could there be
intelligent life on planets outside our solar
system ? We must first ask, however, whether
there are any planets beyond our own system.

With no direct evidence to help us, how can
we begin to tackle such a problem ? By looking
around us, within our own family of planets, and
deciding on how our own solar system was
formed. If, in order to explain it, we have to
invoke fantastically improbable events (such as
the close approach to the sim of another star at
some remote past epoch) then we shall reach a
very pessimistic conclusion. But if we can
understand the origin and major characteristics
of the solar system by appealing only to well-
established laws and higWy probable chains of
events, then our conclusion must be that planets
are indeed abundant in association with stars;
and that therefore we are probably not alone in
the Galaxy. Now it is perhaps clearer why we
need to know as much as possible about our own
solar system.

The ‘encounter hypothesis’ in which a star
came close to the sun and produced tidal waves
which splashed into space and then condensed to
form the planets, was indeed put forward as a
serious theory at the beginning of this century.
When the consequences of this theory were
worked out, however, they did not fit the sort of
planetary system in which we find ourselves, and
the theory has lost favour. The near-collisions
required by the encoimter hypothesis are
indeed very rare events, such is the vastness of
the gulf between the stars.

Present theories of the origin of the solar
system centre upon the idea that the sun and all
the planets formed about four thousand million
years ago from the condensation of an
interstellar dust and gas cloud. The details of this
theory have been worked out and the predictions
(which are the acid test of any theory) so far
line up very well with the solar system as we
know it. The more volatile constituents of the
original cloud first condensed to form the outer
gas giants like Jupiter; and the heavier elements
separated out later to form the so-called
terrestrial planets, closer to the sun. The asteroids
and comets also have their places in this theory,
and as more data comes in, the ‘equilibrium-
condensation model’ as it is called, gains support.
Very well, you may say; but what has all that to
do with the question of extraterrestrial life ?
Quite a lot.

Firstly, the theory says that there is a close
relationship between all the objects in the solar .
system, and that this relationship is the
necessary and logical consequence of the laws of
physics as we know them now; that gives us
confidence, for a start. Secondly — and this is the
vital point — the formation of planets appears
to be a normal by-product of the formation of a

star. Planets, therefore, should be common, not
rare. We should note finally that the
composition of the sun is just about the same as
that of most stars. It is this sort of reasoning
which has led to predictions of large numbers of
inhabited planets and of advanced civilisations
in our galaxy. Let’s see what kind of numbers
have been produced.

At a conference on Communication with Extra-
Terrestrial Intelligence (CETI for short, if you
like acronyms) Carl Sagan gave the results of
some very tentative calculations. Of the
hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy,
about one in a hundred thousand would be
expected to support an advanced technical
civilisation. That means about a million such
civilisations in existence now! But surely this
means that we have reached a contradiction : we
have been scanning the sky for over ten years
now with our radio telescopes, yet we have
picked up no messages from the stars. What has
gone wrong ? The interstellar telegraph lines
must be jammed solid by now, surely ? Has there
been some terrible miscalculation in our theories
and are we alone in the imiverse after all ?

Are we alone ?

It is a fact that our radio transmissions could
be detected from the nearer stars using
equipment no more advanced than we are using
now. If (and it is a big if) there are all those
civilisations out there, why haven’t we heard
from them ? To understand Sagan’s
explanation of this, we need a little quick
revision of distance measurements on an
astronomical scale.

A light-year is not a unit of time but of
distance: it is the distance that light would travel
in a year. It is a rather large unit for
measurements within the solar system, but
quite suitable for the nearer stars. Light from the
sun takes about eight minutes to reach us from
about a hundred million miles away; it takes
about five hours to reach the outermost planet,
Pluto; but it takes over foury^eari to reach even
the nearest known star. Light would need about
one htmdred thousand years to cross the Galaxy
completely.

Sagan estimates the average distance between
advanced technical civilisations such as ours to be
about five hundred light-years. We must get a
feel for what that means, and some numbers
might help.

Radio waves travel at the speed of light. So
if we sent a message to the average-distance
civilisation five hundred light years away —
assuming that we knew in which direction to
transmit — then the time we should have to wait
before getting any response would be at least the
round-trip signal time of a thousand years. That
is, if they happened to be listening, if they
recognised the message as a message, and if they
thought it worth the effort of an immediate
reply. A signal first sent out in say 1945 (when
high-power radar transmissions were becoming
common) might be expected to evoke a reply
from an average-distance civilisation by the year
2945 (two thousand nine hundred and forty-five)
at the earliest.

*Life on Earth began as a
deliberate infection of
micro-organisms placed here by
another civilisation. We are
therefore on a biological
culture-plate or in an incubator,
being observed (presumably)
through some kind of
microscope.’

Of course, there might be a communicative
civilisation much nearer than five hundred light-
years. If we really stretch the odds and assume
that there is one only (!) fifty light-years
distant, then we still have no right to expea a
response to our transmissions before the year
2045 (two thousand and forty-five) at the
earliest.

Look at it another way. If we assume that we

20 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

started sending sufficiently powerful radio
transmissions thirty years ago, then they
have reached out precisely thirty light-years and
no further. Beyond that distance there is an
information horizon beyond which no receiver, no
matter how sensitive, could possibly detect our
existence. If we seriously expect a response to
our signals now, it means that the source of the
reply must not be more than fifteen light-years
away; and fifteen light-years is a lot less than the
average figure of five hundred given by Sagan.

To sum up: there is no contradiction between
the two statements that planets are relatively
common and that we have not yet had any
messages from the stars. It is precisely what one
would expect at this stage. Yet the information
horizon I mentioned is receding at the speed of
light; the ‘sphere of influence’ within which
signals from us can be received is swallowing
space at an ever-increasing rate. If we compare
the volume of space enclosed by our sphere of
influence after twenty years with the volume after
two years, we get a ratio of not ten to one but a
thousand to one; and after two hundred years
the volume enclosed has increased a millionfold.
Eventually the tide of radio waves will sweep
past some distant receiver and they will know —
if they did not know already — that they are not
alone. It is a waiting game, and at present there is
little we can do but play it as patiently as we can.

Out of the corner of my eye I see the
gleaming edge of the Razor of Occam. But it is
too late to stop now : we must rush on to the very
limits of possibility, and then keep going after
that. If you are of a nervous disposition, or more
than usually gullible, may I suggest that you
read no further.

Speculations

One assumption we must make, if we are to
continue at all, is that there really is someone
out there, alive and intelligent. If we don’t
assume that then, by definition, there ain’t much
to speculate about.

Speculations, starting from that assumption,
can be conveniendy grouped under two headings :
either ‘they’ are aware of us or they are not.

Let’s start with by far the more likely of the
two: that they are not aware of us.

Top of the list of possible reasons why we
haven’t heard from them is the simple one that
the news of our birth (in radio terms) has just
not reached them yet. Even at the speed of light,
our signals have only traversed about thirty of the
five hundred or so light-years to the
hypothetical average-distance advanced
civilisation described by Sagan. Yet there is one
big factor that I have not taken into account :
interception.

Even if we accept that we cannot expect to
have a response to our signals for a long time to
come, why have we not intercepted the signals
that they are sending to one another ? Space
should be full of signals radiating in aU
directions, just like ours; and some at least of
these advanced civilisations must have been at it
for a lot longer than we have. So what’s wrong ?

One possibility that has been put forward is
that we have not been tuning in to the right
frequencies. This is very reasonable, since it is
far from obvious what ‘natural’ frequency one
might choose. Our ‘listening’ frequencies in the
past have been limited by those signals which
can penetrate the atmosphere; a really systematic
search would need an orbital radio telescope, free
from this filtering effect and able to receive
signals at any frequency. However, I have an
idea of my own about why we have not
intercepted the messages they are sending to one
another.

Suppose that you were going to try and signal
to someone whose position you knew
accurately, using a torch at night. If they were
several miles away you would adjust the torch
focus to the narrowest possible beam to make the
best possible use of the light from the bulb.

You wotild certainly not remove the reflector and
let the light go off in all directions, relying on
them spotting the few thousandths of one
percent that happened to go in their direction.
This is just what we do with microwave links
here on Earth: they have highly directional
aerials in order to make the best possible use of
the power available. If this technique is needed
between two points on Earth, how much more

necessary it will be for communication between
the stars ! The links, if they are at all of the sort

‘Of course other civilisations
have existed and destroyed
themselves in nuclear wars,
as we shall do in our turn, and
that is why the radio sky is so
quiet.’

we can imagine, will need to use very tight beams
(like laser beams) in order to maximise the
received power. It is not surprising that we have
failed to intercept such beams. If they are
unaware of our existence, they will not have a
transmitter pointed in our direction.

Still continuing with the assumption that they
are unaware of us, what other possibilities are
there ? Perhaps we have missed the point entirely
and are in fact intercepting messages without
even realising that they are messages ; and the
fact that they are not intended for us wouldn’t
make things any easier. How about
gravitational waves ? Thought waves ?

And while on the subject of getting the
message, here is a favourite puzzle of mine : when
is a noise not a noise ? When it’s a signal, you
will say, and quite right too. But how and when
do you give up studying a transmission and
decide that it is noise ? This question is of great
interest to military electronics experts; they
want to disguise a signal to seem like noise (to
the enemy). Have we really studied the radio
‘noise’ spectrum from space carefully enough ?
And in particular, have we studied it for long
enough ? Our own techniques for transmitting
information over interplanetary distances (for
example from the Pioneer and Mariner probes)
can give a clue : we transmit the pictures one
fragment at a time, building up each dot
painfully and slowly, improving the signal to
noise ratio by taking more time over the signal. If
we need that for distances within our own solar
system, what sort of scaling factor would apply
between the stars ? How long do you sample
a waveform before deciding in your wisdom that
it is just noise ?

Incidentally, if we fail to recognise their
signals as signals, there is a chance that they
could make the same mistake with ours.

That would be one sort of time barrier — the
sampling time needed to distinguish a signal
from the background of noise. But there is
another, equally fundamental kind of time
barrier: the biological clock. Imagine trying to
communicate with a flea; then with a tree. You
see the point: the time-scales or lifetimes of the
two are vastly different from one another and
from the time-scale of a human being. A flea has
a great deal it must do before it is ready to die,
and it behaves accordingly. A tree, on the other
hand, can live for five thousand years. All right.
I’m not seriously suggesting that we should talk
to the trees (though we might try listening to
them) but the mere fact of such vast differences
of tempo in the life-forms on our planet surely
opens up at least the possibility that there may be
comparable differences between even highly
intelligent species in the Galaxy as a whole ?
What sort of frequencies might tree-fike beings
use to communicate ? A few cycles per year ? The
iifformation flow rate can afford to go down
quite a lot when you can rely on fifty centuries of
uninterrupted gossip.

The thing that we are slowly coming to
appreciate is that life is a property of matter,
neither more nor less. We have evolved imder a
special set of circumstances ; are we therefore
freaks, or is life universal and infinitely
adaptable in response to the circumstances in
which it exists ? If we find life — any kind of life
— on the other planets in the solar system, with
their different conditions, then it will begin to
look as though, given time, life can appear under
virtually any conditions. Time is the key; with
enough time, it is a property of matter that if you
have the right mixture and you cook it until it is
just right (you have all the time in the world,
remember) then eventually it will organise itself
into stable chains of molecules able to

reproduce themselves. After that, it is again only
a matter of time (a thousand million years ?)
until at last, somewhere, a collection of
molecules organises itself to the point where
it can sit up and think. That’s us. We happen to
be bipeds who have evolved on an oxygen-rich
planet with plenty of water. Our long-chain
molecules rely on the remarkable properties of
the carbon atom. As far as we know, only silicon
is capable of forming molecules having that
order of complexity and so might form an
alternative basis for life. But we cannot possibly
say at this stage what a thousand million years of
evolution might do for collections of
molecules on a planet orbiting, say, an X-ray
star; or a planet with enormous gravity; or with
a radiation belt that could induce mutations at
millions of times the rate possible in our
evolution. We just don’t know.

The idea of intelligent life-forms co-existing,
yet being totally unaware of one another’s
existence owing to the biological time-barrier,
fascinates me and I would like to give you a very
amusing illustration of the idea I read about
recently. A competition in the USA offered a
prize for the wittiest solution to the following
problem : devise a suitable conversation between
a man, a woman and an alien on the first
encounter. The winning entry showed the man
and the woman standing together beside what
looked like a potted plant. This was the
conversation, if my memory serves :

Man : I see no sign of intelligent life.

Woman: Nor do I.

Plant: Me neither.

Now, having considered the possibility that
‘they’ are there but don’t know about us, suppose
instead that they do know about us. That is
the less likely, but much more sinister
possibility.

If we accept for the moment that they know
about us but decline to communicate, we are led
to ask why. There are some who maintain that
they have been in touch before, perhaps
thousands of years ago, and have left their marks
if only we had the wit to appreciate the fact.
Should we take these ideas seriously ? Your guess
is at least as good as mine. I shall finish by passing
on two ideas along these lines, both proposed
recently by quite respectable members of the
scientific community.

The first suggestion is that life on Earth began
as a deliberate infection of micro-organisms
placed here by another civilisation. We are
therefore on a biological culture-plate or in an
incubator, being observed (presimiably) through
some kind of microscope. And who would bother
to start a conversation with a microbe ?

The second idea is that we are a protected
species, living in a section of space set aside as a
sanctuary where we can develop naturally; a
kind of zoo, in fact. Of course, our keepers would
not want the visitors to disturb us !

Down to Earth again

We began on firm groimd by considering how
our unmanned space probes would undoubtedly
tell us within the next few years whether
primitive microbes exist on Mars; we finished by
wondering whether we ourselves might be just
teeming, ephemeral bacteria under some cosmic
microscope. The question of intelligent
extraterrestrial life is very much an open one;
even Carl Sagan himself admits that we could
indeed be alone in the universe after all.

Sceptics dismiss the whole subject as a
colossal waste of time; cynics say that of course
other civilisations have existed — and then
destroyed themselves in nuclear wars, as we shall
do in our turn, and that is why the radio sky is
so quiet.

But the debate goes on. It is not in the nature
of Man to stop theorising just because there
happens to be insufficient data to reach a firm
conclusion; and for myself at least, I would not
have it otherwise.

Jupiter is an enormous cauldron
in which Nature experiments
with mixtures which might
eventually produce life

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 21

T *

22; SCIENCE FICTION MONTHL>t^:

T he truth of the matter is, doctor,’ the gaunt young man explained
slowly, ‘I’m just imemployable.’ His haggard features, etched with
resignation and defeat, were momentarily enhvened by a trace of tired
expectancy as he awaited the other’s reaction.

Doctor Plumhart nodded vigorously in understanding for perhaps a
quarter o^ minute, then performed an adroit ninety degree shift in his
cranial oscifetions t^^monstfate his disagreement.* ^M^Shaw,’ he g,.
rephed with assura^J|^tno-one in full possession of his faculties, as you
obviously are, can be. considered unemployable.’ What I mean, he thought
Behind the facade of his flashing smile, is that ther^ are no absolutes in
this world. No-one is ever perfect, not even to the e^S'ent of being
unemployable. He silenced his patient’s attempted interruption with a
friendly wave of his hand.

‘Oh,' I know you’re twenty-six, and you’ve had nearly two hundred jobs,
covering everything from polishing gold bricks at the Royal Mint to
’aardvark keeper at Whipsnade Zoo— ^ ' , ' ’ ■ "

‘None of which I could hold dowm^haw cut in. He had spent twenty
iinutes reciting details of his life, a drab and pitiful story of lonehness
d fail^lfei^

Dr Plumhart seemed oddly umnoved by Shaw’s chronicle of woe. Ofci the
ai^ he had lolled comfortably in his swivel chair, hstening and
ing fatuously in the face of his patient’^ harrowing history. From ■
le to^time he bobbed his piebald, frizzy poll in appreciation of points
which' apparently bore special significance^fdr him*^.

Shaw wondered fleetingly whether he might have been mistakenly
oduced to another psychiatric patient. No; the astonishing oddness
the man had been hinted at by the Rehabilitation Committee, who
nevertheless appeared to regard him with considerable esteem. This jolly
dy, on considering Dick Shaw’s case-history, had mentally wrung their
collective hands and then cast around for a suitable repository to receive
is hot potato, before it burned their metaphoric fingers.

Equally desperate were the staff of the local branch of the Ministry of
Vocation (labour was an unmentionable word following the debacle of the
latest government bearing that titla)w. Like the Rehabilitation Committee,
they had been very glad to unload him. Just as, he thought apathetically.

Dr Plumhart in turn would undoubtedly shunt him on to someone-else.

I wish he'd let me in on the big joke, he thought with a spasm, of
imoyance. He shifted uncomfortably on his chair, eyeing the daftly and
rather absurd little psychiatrist with his cheerful smile and^gleam|j^g
spectacles.

‘What would you hke to do ? I mean really like to do
suddenly asked. There was a long pause.

‘I would like to feel normal,’ Shaw replied tonelessly.j

‘Yes, yes, but if you felt normal, what would you then like to do ?’

This time there was no hesitation. ‘To go on an interstellar trip.’

Just for a moment the doctor’s smile faded. ‘An unusual ambition,’ he
commented thoughtfully. They were silent for a few seconds; the beaming
little doctoiynd Shaw, tense and restless. They were thinking of the' score '
of ships and the hundreds of brave men who had left the solar system
during the past fifty years.

Every expedition had failed. Beamed messages, faint and intermittent,
had filtered back across the light years. Madness awaited man between the
stars. The soul-crushing isolation of shipboard communities and the
inescapable boredom and frustration of multi-year voyages, played leading
roles in the tragedy of mankind’s dream of galactic colonisation.

All the expeditions had suffered extinction. Almost to a man, the crew

doctor.’ Shav

^ rent mirth. _ ^ ^ _

■ wB^has made me we%.ias^

“""^''^-and easily

likehhood of extermination hardly help matters. Still, it’s the same for
everyone, I suppose . . .’

‘Quite. These are troubled times for all of—.’

‘Doctor, what d^ you think is wrong with me ?’ *

The cheery Uttle doctor was not in the least discomfited by Shaw’s
dij^t question. ‘I ^wc^what is responsible for your — ,’ he paused
momentarily, ‘ — affliction. The cause and remedy were apparent as you
walked through the doorway.’

Shaw’s thin features registered disbelief. He gaped in incredulous
resentment at Plumhart. The plump little doctor was either mad — or
he was a genius. Shaw had previously consulted numerous medical
practitioners in attempting to rid himself of his anxiety neurosis and
depression. None of them had been able to help him, yet this smirking
buffoon claimed to have solved the problem on sight. If he asked one more
stupid question — .

‘What career did your mother have in mind for you when you were a
chfid ?’

Once again jhere was a long pause while doctor and patient surveyed
each other over the tidy desk, beaming good humour on the one hand, and
r^-faced perplexity on the othei;. Shaw could not hold Plumhart’s
cjbizzical stare.

‘A ballet dancer,’ he mutterecBtii painful embarrassment.

‘I thought so.’ Plumhart nodded ^smugly. ‘Ballet dancer, male model,
tight-rope artist, I knew it was soniething qf that nature.’

‘Tight-rope artist!’ Shaw exploded wrathfully. The little man was
oblivious to his annoyance, however, frizzy poll bent industriously over
his desk as he scribbled on a pad. He straightened with his smile
predictably broader than ever, and tore the top sheet off the pad.

‘Take this prescription to a good stockist.’

Shaw examined the note with wide eyes. By now he was almost beyond
speech. Running shaking fingers through his sandy hair, he fought to
regain coherent utterance.

‘This is a prescription for a pair of shoes!’ he gasped.

‘That’s right. A pair two sizes bigger than those you’re wearing.’
Plumhart’s eyes were bright with triumph. ‘I knew the moment you
■ danced into the room, like a man treading on hot coals. I ^id to myself,
“here’s a man with tight shoes. A cramped sole means a pmched soul”.

‘Your mother wanted you to have dainty, pretty feet, so she kept you in
tight shoes. You’ve squeezed your feet into undersize shoes ever since,
because of a misconception formed in your childhood that the right shoes
are tight shoes.’

‘The room had been
thoroughly searched befoie
the meeting. Only the
previous week an American
spy had been discovered
lashed to the underside of
the table in this very room.

The juicy sounds of his
chomping on a wad of
mentholated gum proved
his undoing.’

‘I’d like to believe you. Doctor, I reaUy would.’ Shaw was eyeing
the prescription in his hand partly in doubt, partly in wonder. ‘But how
can tight shoes make a person neurotic ?’

‘Think, Dick think! Can any person suffering continuous pain think or
act_ constructively ? Your whole life has been one of endless, all-
pervading pain, permeating every fibre of your existence; mind-numbing,
oppressive torture, eating into you, tearing and piercing your very psyche.’

, Shaw was still dubious. ‘I don’t feel any better when I take my shoes
6ff.’ As Plumhart opened his mouth to speak, he hurried on, ‘I suppose
I’m so completely immersed in this condition that temporary removal
of the irritant has no effect. Is that it ?’

‘Exactly. That’s the situation in a nutshell.’

‘A nutshell, eh ?’ Shaw halted, half risen from his chair. ‘Look,

Doctor Plumhart, would you explain one thing which is puzzling me ? Why
all the laughs ? What’s so funny in my condition ?’

‘Nothing.’ The little man lay back in his black swivel chair, his feet
on the desk. ‘Nothing whatsoever. I never joke about a patient or his
problems.

‘What I do is “think happy”. Contrary to belief held in some quarters,
a man works most consistently and efficiently when he is in a happy,
contented state. Within limits, contentment is a mental attitude, wWch,
again within limits, may be acquired as a habit.

‘Of course, it cannot cure disorders of a neurotic, much less psy^opc,
nature. What it does is to elevate the temperamental^vel a couple of' *.
■ notches of so, inducing a proportional enhancement m intellectual and *

emotional’qualities.’

, . He grimaced cheerfully. ‘What a mouthful! You see!’ he ended ^

. triumphantly, ‘the mere idea of it has you smiling, for the first time since
you entered this room.’

He stood up and shook hands with Shaw. ‘Well, goodbye Dick. You
won’t need to see me again. lust remember two things, though. Think

len® ftsard, at 6o, was at the pinnacle
coincidem£, transatlantic relations were at an
: siigtaiMdiil of lowness. In conjunction, these two factors

an abundtaice of workmg activity. Continued on page 28

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 23

SCIENCE FICTION

fMEW EIMGLI5H LIBRAnY MONTHLY

Ursula Le Guin is established as a formidable figure in children’s literature
with her fantasy novels, and as a leading name in the sf genre, but now
the obvious hurdle remaining to her is to transcend the stigma of the sf label
and establish herself as an important novelist. This is the most difficult hurdle
of all; so far only Aldiss, Ballard and Vonnegut have unquestionably cleared
it. But with her new novel The Dispossessed— plainly sf, although Gollancz
have not published it as such — there seems little doubt that Ursula Le Guin
is about to join that illustrious trio.

The Dispossessed is a big book, but it is not (as are most long sf novels)
bloated. Ms Le Guin uses its length to marshal the full range of her arguments
in a manner worlds removed from the usual sf technique of fast and loose
narrative and discussion. The novel is Ursula Le Guin's attempt at a Utopia,
at devising as nearly idea! a society as possible. Unlike Thomas More's
invented society — or those of many later Utopianists — it is a world seen

DispSsessed

By Ursula Le Guin
Reviewed by Malcolm Edwards

(Gollancz, 1974, 319pp. £2.80)

you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other
words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from ? . . . Public opinion /
That's the power structure he's part of, and knows how to use. The un-
admitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling
the individual mind. ... On Urras, Odo said that human solidarity is our one
hope. But we've betrayed that hope. We've let co-operation become obedi-
ence. On Urras they have government by the minority. Here we have govern-
ment by the majority. But it is government / . . . Nobody's born an Odonian
any more than he's born civilised ! But we've forgotten that. We don't educate
for freedorh. Education, the most important activity of the social organism,
has got rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids learn to parrot Odo's words as if,
they were laws— ?/?e ultimate blasphemy !'

Eventually, Shevek's determination to pursue his own path leads him to
accept an invitation to travel to Urras to receive their equivalent of the Nobel
Prize. There, he intends to bring to fruition his life's work: the development

from the inside rather than the outside. It is easy to describe a perfect society;
it is much more difficult to show it at work, inhabited by real people, because
imperfect human nature then tends to come into conflict with the supposedly
perfect institutions. Knowing this, Ms Le Guin makes it very dear that this
society, too, has its flaws. The Odonian society ofAnarres in The Disposses-
sed is a Utopia with feet of day.

Anarres and Urras, the twin worlds which are the setting of this novel,
circle the star Tau Ceti — but they can conveniently be thought of as a parallel
to this solar system in which the Moon — Anarres — is somewhat larger and
Is an Inhabitable, if arid world. Ursula Le Guin's useful background (which
this novel shares with The Left Hand of Darkness and much of her other
sf) ascribes the origin of homo sapiens to the ancient world of Hain: it
was the Hainish who were responsible for the seeding of humanity on Earth,
as well as on Urras and Anarres. Thus the two planets have human inhabitants
but have no direct links with Earth, a device which enables the author to
create her societies without having to borrow anything from our world save
mankind himself. There are many similarities — they are essential to the story —
but In developing Urrasti and Anarresti society Ms Le Guin frees herself
from the weight of the legacy of our history and institutions, and can thus
build precisely the worlds she needs to build.

Society on Anarres is an offshoot, a couple of centuries old, of that of Urras.
It is founded on the precepts of the revolutionary philosophy propounded by
the thinker Odo, whose concept of an anarchic state based on individual
social responsibility had nearly caused the downfall of government on Urras.
In order to save themselves, the Urrasti establishment bought off Odo's
followers by giving them Anarres. Since that time the two worlds have been
almost totally cut off from each other. On Anarres, where there is no such
thing as private property, the only boundary wall on the planet is the one
which surrounds the spaceport where a few Urrasti ships land each year.
From the Anarresti point of view, the wall hems in the universe, leaving
Anarres free; from the universe's point of view it encloses Anarres in a self-
imposed quarantine.

On Anarres there are no laws. There is no compulsion to do anything. If a
man does not wish to work he need not: he still has free access to food,
clothing, shelter. People use these things as they need them; they do not,
cannot, own them. • The greatest insult on Anarres Is to be termed a 'proper-
tarian'. A centra! computer-backed agency allocates jobs and postings:
Anarres is still a poor planet, and local emergencies or major projects may
require a large work-force to be raised for a time. But anyone is at liberty to
refuse such a posting. If you do not do your share you may become un-
popular with your neighbours, but this may be avoided by moving around a
lot — and there is a whole class of people, the nuchnibi, who do just this.

The intention was to establish a non-centralised society, run federatively
rather than hierarchically. 'There was to be no controlling centre, no capital,
no establishment for the self-perpetuating machinery of bureaucracy and the
dominance drive of individuals seeking to become captains, bosses. Chiefs
of State.' The impulse towards forming dominance-based relationships is
discouraged in children; self-centredness, 'egoising', is condemned.

The somewhat puritan philosophy fits the barren world. 'Excess is excre-
ment', wrote Odo. 'Excrement retained in the body is a poison.' This is very
appropriate to a world like Anarres, where there is normally no excess;
where, simply in order to survive, everything, every task, must be shared.

Shevek, the novel's protagonist, is a brilliant young Anarresti physicist.
We follow his growth and development at school, at the Institute of Physics,
at various locations around Anarres where he finds himself posted. We also
see, through his maturing eyes, the centra! flaw which is developing in the
Odonian system becoming apparent. In this rulerless society, initiative is
slowly being stifled. There are no laws, but the social imperative is towards
working with others — anything different, anything non-conformist or
revolutionary, is frowned upon; it is disfunctional, and functionalism has been
made paramount.

Shevek first begins to realise this when he goes to the Institute of Physics
to study under the older physicist, Sabul. The most advanced work in physics
is being done on Urras, and only Sabul has a channel of information on
Urrasti developments. 'It occurred to [Shevek~\ once that Sabul wanted to
keep the new Urrasti physics private — to own it, as a property, a source of
power over his colleagues on Anarres.' The thought repels him and he tries
to reject it, but the power Sabul has over him — in recommending against
obscure lines of research, in controlling his contacts with Urras, in trying to
make him pursue acceptable lines of science — is inescapable.

Shevek's discontent crystallises through a series of arguments, chiefly
with an old friend, Bedap, who is already convinced that the principles of
Odonianism are being betrayed, and who sees Babul's behaviour as just one
more example. 'Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents

of a General Temporal Theory, whose theoretical framework will make it
possible to devise an instrument for the instantaneous transmission of
messages across interstellar space, which will make possible a true federation
of worlds.

At first he works contentedly enough in the cloistered atmosphere of a
university, though he is aware that his view of Urrasti society is very limited,
and its social inequalities and monetary economy baffle and appal him. ('He
tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him beyond endurance,
it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid
dream. ') But after a while he can no longer ignore the fact that he is a political
weapon to the various Urrasti nations, who want to get hold of his theory
first, and he finds himself drawn into a revolutionary political movement and
sees for himself that side of Urrasti society previously hidden from him.

It is almost Impossible to talk about this novel except in terms of the dis-
cussion on political and power systems which runs through its pages. This
is what matters most in the book: Ms Le Guin's crushing critique of our
capitalist, 'propertarian', society (and, equally, of the State-dominated
'communist' nations). / say 'our' society, for it is impossible not to see the
chief nations of Urras, A-lo and Thu, as slightly distorted versions of the
USA and the USSR. And beside what Shevek finds on Urras, the admittedly
imperfect society of Anarres, requiring as it does constant vigilance — and a
continuing revolutionary spirit — to hold to Its ideals, appears more and more
attractive.

It may be argued that in presenting this debate Ursula Le Guin has weighted
the dice a little. As mentioned earlier, Anarresti society seems to work well
largely because Anarres is such a harsh world: co-operation is necessary
for survival. It is difficult to see it working so well on lush Urras soil, where
the unco-operative could more easily turn their backs on society and build
their own comfortable niches. Already on Anarres, the petty and the jealous
have found ways of Imposing themselves on others; on Urras, one can
visualise the Odonian society quickly fostering a series of small, independent
communities. Also Urras, from which comparisons are made, seems to be
painted just a little too black, the contrast between the decadent wealthy
and the miserable masses a little too wide for the lesson to carry maximum
impact. When Shevek eventually escapes the cosy world into which his hosts
have thrust him, the world he finds himself in — the 'other' Urras — is oddly
reminiscent in its atmosphere of 1940s films like The Third Man:

'A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark; there were no street
lights. The lamp posts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were
broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there
. . . The pavement, greasy with rain, was Uttered with scraps of paper and
refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were
all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which
had been gutted by fire . . . People went by, silent hasty shadows.'

But Ms Le Guin regains her balance by providing the salutary extra per-
spective of an ambassador from Earth, to whose eyes it is Urras which is the
Utopia:

7 know it's full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it's
also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a world should be !
It is alive, tremendously alive— alive, despite all its evils, with hope . . .
My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species . . . The
air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable —
but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord.
You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert ... We can only
look at this splendid world, this vita! society, this Urras, this Paradise, from the
outside. We are capable only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little.'

The Dispossessed is an endlessly absorbing novel, which deserves to be
read and reread with great care. / may have been guilty of making it sound a
little dry and stuffy; if so, / have done it a disservice, for it is nothing of the
kind. Ursula Le Guin is too good a novelist for that. The Dispossessed has a
good, strong, human story, filled with believable and well-rounded characters.
Ms Le Guin uses the simple structure of alternating chapters from Shevek's
life on Anarres and his period on Urras to make many of her points with casual
subtlety. On the occasions when debate does take over from narrative, the
debate is never dull. It is actually endlessly quotable: my copy bristles with
markers which / inserted at particularly telling points, and / have been unable
to resist using several of the quotes. It also presents one of the most carefully -
developed and apparently self-consistent alternative societies we have seen
in science fiction.

It is, furthermore, true science fiction. Shevek is not just a physicist by
name, he practises some very authentic-sounding physics. It is — as / hope
some of the quotes will have indicated— extremely well-written, a true sf
novel of ideas which is virtually certain to become a classic of the genre.
Don't miss it.

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 25

By Julie Davis

MINISTRY OF SCIENCE FICTION ?
In recent months it has appeared
that science fiction is going up in
the world, especially as MENSA,
the high IQ society, is now taking
such an active interest in it. In June
this year Isaac Asimov was created
joint vice-president of the society
and whilst in England gave a
lecture with Arthur C Clarke in
which they both discussed their sf
work. But, MENSA's latest move is
a little more controversial, Mr
Richard Kirby, the society's research
officer and ideas chairman, has
suggested that we establish a
government ministry of science
fiction !

Mr Kirby has made a careful
study of Olaf Stapledon's novel
Last and First Men in which we are
introduced to the concept of the
‘group mind', such a collective
intelligence would, Mr Kirby
believes, benefit us all. Taking ideas
from works of speculative fiction
and putting them into practice is
then the basis of Mr Kirby's
suggestions. He has placed science
fiction in the context of
contemporary philosophy of science
which is an attempt to define the
methods which lead to scientific
progress. Here he quotes Sir Karl
Popper who says there is a formula
which leads to the discovery of
knowledge: 'Conjecture boldly and
subject your theories to severe
testing'.

In Mr Kirby's view sf writers
provide our greatest source of
conjecture, because it is the nature
of their subject to go beyond the
information they already have. In
fact sf has been defined as : 'An
attempt to study the effect on
human experience and behaviour
of changes and supposed changes
in science and technology'.

Science fiction explores the
possible.

Unfortunately throughout sf the
same themes appear again and
again, there is apparently a great
poverty of imagination, although a
few books do seem to be on the
right lines. For example Noise Level
by Raymond F Jones which is the
story of a film made about the
discovery of anti-gravity, when it is
shown to a group of scientists
they hurry off to discover it for
themselves believing that it is
possible but not knowing how,
when they do discover it they are
told that the film was a hoax.
Katherine Maclean's short story
The Snowball Effect also provides
us with an example of bold
conjecture with its tale of applied
sociology.

In short, Mr Kirby is suggesting
an academic discipline of applied
science fiction. He proposes that a
comprehensive content analysis of
all science fiction be prepared to
provide a computer bank of
hypotheses which can be fed to
scientists; he is encouraging
scientific researchers to send their
problems to sf writers who will
solve them in fiction ; and he also
suggests that liaison committees be
set up between scientists and
writers to combine the actual with
the possible.

He rejects our passive role as
objects in the universe, we are
subjects and as such we should
take the future in our own hands
and define it into existence. Mr
Kirby believes that the
responsibility for this lies with the

sf writers, he wants universities and
research establishments to employ
resident sf writers to stimulate new
and worthwhile research. He even
goes as far as to suggest that sf
will no longer stand for science
fiction but henceforth it will mean
science fertiliser \

Needless to say Mr Kirby's ideas
were not received too favourably
by the scientists present at the
meeting.

IF YOU'VE GOT A PET SF
SHORT STORY (not the one
you've just written, unless its
appeared in print) that you
think says something
constructive about the world
then you might like to contact
Dr John Borden. He is currently
compiling an anthology of sf
and speculative fiction short
stories to be used as a college
textbook for training
vocational counsellors and
therapists. The sort of story he
is looking for should depict:
an alternative life style: the
impact of change; the meaning
of work or leisure; or any other
concept or setting that will
help to make the students more
'future-orientated'. Dr
Borden is an associate
professor at The Florida State
University, Tallahassee,

Florida 32306, USA, and that's
where you should send your
nominations.

SF GOES INTERNATIONAL— we
have just received a copy of
ANTARES which is a Turkish
fanzine I Written completely in
Turkish, except for an English
summary at the beginning,
ANTARES seems to compare
favourably as regards appearance
with the other fanzines we've
received. From the summary /
gather that sf in Turkey is
influenced mainly by STAR TREK,
the books of Erich Von Daeniken
and the film 2001. Thanks to the
enterprising soul who sent us
ANTARES all the way from Turkey
{how did you get a copy of SFM ?)
and good luck with future issues !
Meanwhile, does anyone know of
any Turkish evening classes in
progress at the moment ?

CORRIGENDUM : In SFM Vol 1
No 6 we gave the name of the
treasurer of the Tolkien Society as
Archie Mercer; there has now been
a change of personnel in the
society and Mrs Janet Gibb has
taken over. So all membership
subscriptions should be paid to her
at 49 Beresford Road, Islington,
London N5.

BOOKS

The Sky is Falling by Lester Del
Rey. Published by New English
Library, 30p. The story of a parallel
universe which exists within a
dome, when the dome begins to
crack- up it appears that the sky is
falling. To save their world the
inhabitants have to borrow someone
from our universe, a skilled
engineer, who can patch up the
cracks.

The Moon Is Hell by John W
Campbell. Published by New
English Library, 30p. This is the
first in a new series of science
fiction classics. John W Campbell
is renowned as editor of several
science fiction magazines in the
thirties, forties and fifties. He is also

a sf writer and The Moon Is Hell
is a study of the effects of the moon
on the first men who landed there.

The Roots of Coincidence
by Arthur Koestler. Published by
Picador, 50p. The
relationships between
respectable science and the
science of the supernatural are
constantly changing. Close
ties between research and the
occult formed in the days of the
alchemist have fallen away
and been partially rebuilt,
especially as the study of
parapsychology becomes of
wider scientific interest.
Arthur Koestler has created
this book from a discussion of
several syntheses of physics
and metaphysics, the ideas of
men as disparate as Pico Della
Mirandola and Carl Jung. Ever
looking outward, Koestler
pleads for open-minded
analysis, combined with an
indictment of rigid materialism
and superstitious credulity.

The Cosmic Colouring Boole

published by Mushroom Cloud
Publishing Company Limited,
Redhill, Surrey. 75p. This book
contains thirty-six outline drawings
of witches arid wizards; fairies and
flowers, earth, air, fire and water;
inner space and outer space. You
can use water-based paints,
including Polymer and Acrylic,
glitter, crayons, pencil, pentel and
inks, the choice is yours. And when
you've finished you've got a
persona! and permanent picture
book to show to all your friends.

The Other Side of the Sky

by Arthur C Clarke. Published by
Corgi Books, 35p. Imagine you are
the first man to leave Earth in
order to live in space; or imagine
your life in a space station, where
you are dependent on rockets from
Earth to bring you everything you
need; or imagine what happens
when without spacesuit you are
suddenly projected into the total
vacuum which surrounds your cabin
on the perimeter of the space
station. These are only three of the
twenty-four themes that Arthur C
Clarke pursues in this book. These
stories reflect Clarke's reputation as
a brilliant scientist — all the
technical details are handled in a
splendidly assured and dextrous
fashion — and at the same time
display the unflagging fertility of
his imagination, his mastery of the
short-story form (there is
invariably a breathtaking twist in
the final sentence) and his power to
convey a sense of awe and wonder
at the immensities of outer space
and the fantastic possibilities for
mankind that lie just around the
corner.

The Mask of Cthulhu by August
Derleth. Published by Neville
Spearmen, £1 .95. Great
Cthulhu — Hastur the
Unspeakable — sunken R'lyeh —
all come to life again in these
five novellas and one short
story. HP Lovecraft himself
suggested the theme of The
Return of Hastur sY\orX\y before
his death. The remaining tales
in this collection of horror
stories followed naturally upon
it — the account of the terrible
psychic residue that remained
lurking in The House in the
Valley, the gruesome
compulsion which drove the
narrator to his doom in The
Whippoorwills in the Hills;
the inescapable agreement
which lay behind The Sandwin
Compact; and the search which
followed the discovery of The
Seal of RTyeh in the house
near Innsmouth.

Beyond Earth : Man's Contact
With UFOs by Ralph Blum with

Judy Blum. Published by Bantam
Books, 50p. The latest Gallup Poll
reveals that 1 5,000,000 Americans
believe they have seen flying
saucers! Not aircraft, not meteors,
not migrating birds, not high
altitude balloons, not Venus, not
swamp gas, not temperature
inversions, not ball lightning, not
multiple-witness hallucinations,
not plastic garbage bags lit by
candles — but authentic sightings of
unknown unidentified flying
objects by pilots, radar experts,
police officers, astronauts and other
trained observers. In this book
Ralph and Judy Blum examine the
evidence for the existence of
UFOs.

Conscience Interplanetary
by Joseph Green. Published by
Pan Books. 40p. In the
overcrowded twenty-first century,
the conscience of one man must
decide whether life on a newly
discovered world is likely to be
damaged by settlers from Earth. The
pressures of big business and
grasping politics will stop at
nothing to force his hand their way.

Rendezvous With Rama
by Arthur C Clarke. Published by
Pan Books, 40p. Arthur C Clarke
has progressed from 2001 to 21 31
when a mysterious asteroid is
located in space and a probe sent
up to meet it. But they don't find
an asteroid, it is in fact a new
world, artificial and unreal, the first
product of an alien civilisation to be
encountered by man. Rama is a
question mark in the discovery of
other worlds — a paradox that stuns
the confidence of a civilised
universe. As we reach our
rendezvous with Rama we realise
what its purpose is, who is inside it
and why.

The Trail of Cthulhu by August
Derleth. Published by Neville
Spearman, £1.95. No one but
August Derleth could have
captured so skilfully the mood
and design of HP Lovecraft's
Cthulhu Mythos and yet have
done so in a manner all his own.
The story tells of the devious
pursuit of Cthulhu, the search
for his lair in sunken R'lyeh, of
the danger from Cthuihu's
minions, ever wary of detection
and disclosure. It begins in a
house on Curwen Street in
legend-haunted Arkham,
Massachusetts and ends on a
shunned and mysterious island
in the South Pacific. In
between the scene ranges from
the Inca ruins near Machu
Pichu to London, from the
Nameless City of Irem — in a
memorable scene evoking the
shade of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred — to Singapore. The
result is a colourful and
dramatic sequence of events
which fits into place more
pieces in the mosaic of the
Cthulhu Mythos than any other
fiction written since
Lovecraft's death.

Any of you who missed the lecture
given by Isaac Asimov and
introduced by Arthur C Clarke in
London earlier this year may be
interested to know that a cassette
tape recording of the proceedings is
now available. The lecture was
arranged by MENSA, the high IQ
society, and tapes can be obtained
from Steve Odell, 90A Crown Lane,
Southgate, London N1 4 5AA,
at £2.85 each. The tape will be
reviewed in a future issue of SFM.

26 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

READERS’ questions on any aspect of science fiction are dealt with
in this feature so long as they are of general interest. Send your
questions to. THE QUERY BOX, Science Fiction Monthly, New English
Library Ltd, Barnard’s Inn, Holbom, London ECIN 2JR. They will be
dealt with as quickly as possible.

HIDDEN TREASURES

Can you tell me more about Famous
Science Fiction, mentioned in Michael
Ashley’s series on the sf magazines? Is
it still possible to get copies?

WS Bryant, Darlington

This was a pocket-sized magazine,
published quarterly at 50c by Health
Knowledge Inc., New York, starting
with the Winter 1966-7 issue and ending
with the Winter 1968-9 number. It was
edited by Robert AW Lowndes, a former
writer who turned to editing in 1940
and knew the sf field as well as his
editorial consultants, Sam Moskowitz
and Robert A Madle. The policy was to
feature memorable stories of pre-1938
vintage which had not been revived by
the anthologists because they were
‘disreputable’ or ‘obsolete’ though
‘honoured in their own time.’ And the
accent was on ‘Tales of Wonder’ —
sub-title of the magazine.

Among the treasures it unearthed
from Amazing, Wonder, the early
Astounding, the ancient Argosy and
Weird Tales were Ray Cummings’

Girl in the Golden Atom, Charles
Willard Diffin’s Dark Moon, the Stranger
Club tales of Laurence Manning, and
Clark Ashton Smith’s truly fabulous
City of Singing Flame, with its sequel —
both since made available here in the
collection Out of Space and Time
(Spearman, 1972).

Hoariest gem of all was JA Mitchell’s
The Last American, which dates back to
1889. Other, more recent writers
whose tales were resurrected included
Jack Williamson (still furiously active),
‘World-Wrecker’ Edmond Hamilton,
the late Dr David H Keller, and our own
Festus Pragnell. All of whom, with the
erudite Smith, were featured thirty years
ago by Britain’s Tales of Wonder, which
couldn’t get along without reprints.

Lowndes’ precedent, though, was
Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which had a
much richer lode to draw upon and
lasted from 1939 to 1950. And with the
difficulty of securing more desirable
gems from the past, his magazine failed
to make the grade and folded after only
eight issues. Scattered copies appeared
over here eventually and are still
obtainable from specialist dealers.

PAGING MR NOLAN!

A few years back I read two excellent
books by a William F Nolan. I have tried
to obtain more of his works, without
any luck. Could you or your readers
help?

Trevor Bell, Ilford, Essex

William F Nolan is perhaps best-
known here as the co-author, with
George Clayton Johnson, of Logan's Bun
(GoUancz, 1969), a novel envisaging a
future in which nobody can live beyond
the age of 21. If he has written any
other novels they have not yet been
published in the UK, to my knowledge.
But a paperback collection of his short
stories titled Impact-20 was published
here in 1966 by Corgi, who also issued
Logan’s Bun in paperback in 1970.

His earliest sf stories appeared in
Worlds of If, Fantasy and SF, and
Gamma, of which he was managing
editor when it first appeared in 1963.

He later became a prolific writer, critic,
poet, biographer and script writer. He
also authors detective stories and has
published a book on Da^ell Hammett.

In an introduction to Impact-20
Ray Bradbury, who encouraged Nolan
in the days when he was just making

out himself, tells how he became
successful ^ter starting out as a fan
writer. He was actually inspired by
Forrest J Ackerman, to whom he
dedicated A Wilderness of Stars
(GoUancz, 1970), one of at least five
anthologies he has edited : another is
The Pseudo-People (Mayflower, 1967).

LOST WORLD

In the mid-fifties I remember reading a
novel caUed, I think. World D, by an
author named Trevarthern or ‘TreveUyn.
It was probably published in (he
forties or early fifties. Could you help
me trace it?

Bill Wyatt, Kingston-upon-Thames

Yes ; I recaU reading it myself, very
vivify, though it was actuaUy published
in 1935 (Sheed & Ward, London). The
author was JK Heydon, who presented
the story as a manuscript sent to him by
Hal P Trevarthen (you almost got it
right), a distant relative who had
disappeared with his bride from the
island of Guernsey.

The account told of the founding of
HeUoxenon, a subterranean world
constructed beneath the Indian Ocean
by a psycho-physicist who plans to
populate it with selected couples from
the doomed surface world. He is also in
communication with alien creatures on
distant planets and is trying to enlist
their aid in saving Earth from its fate — in
spite of the ‘Law of Independent
Development’.

The menace remained obscure, at
least to me : but the book is fuU of
original conception and altogether
fascinating. I hope you unea^ a copy.

KLAATU CLASSIC

Can you locate for me the story by
Harry Bates, Beturn of the Master, which
appeared around the early fifties and
was later used for the movie. The Day
the Earth Stood Still?

NJ Cockburn, New Malden, Surrey

The story, actuaUy titled Farewell to
the Master, was first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction, October
1940. It was included in the celebrated
anthology. Adventures in Time and
Space, edited by Raymond J Heeily and
J Francis McComas (Random House, New
York, 1946; Grayson, London, 1952).
Harry Bates was editor of the original
Astounding Stories from 1930 to 1933,
and later became a contributor.

IN THE DARK

I need some information on the history
of science fiction films. Can you
recommend an inexpensive book on
the subject?

GT Brooks, Sale, Cheshire

For its size, the paperback Science
Fiction in the Cinema (Tantivy Press)
packs a lot of information and still
pictures into 240 pages, covering
everything from MeU^s’ 1902 Trip to the
Moon to Kubrick’s 2001. The author,
John Baxter, is an Australian who writes
sf when he isn’t watching movies.

WHODUNNIT

Who did the covers for Dune and
Dune Messiah?

DA ly Peddle, Westcliff-on-Sea

The covers of the NEL paperback
editions of Frank Herbert’s tales of the
planet Dune were painted by Bruce
Pennington. An article about him
appeared in the first issue of SFM.

With reference to Derek Stokes'
letter in SFM Vol 1 No 8, 1 feel
compelled to write and defend my
sex. I am quite willing to acceptthat
he is writing from his personal
experiences, but really . . . !

My husband and myself are
both avid sf readers. We both buy
books and, in common with most
other married couples we know of,
do not need to justify or explain why
the weekly budget is slightly out and
why extra books have appeared on
the bookshelf AGAIN. Asfor hiding
books or sending them to a friend’s
address there are just as many men
who make their wives feel guilty
about spending money on things
they enjoy -e.g. the new hats that
suddenly appear. If more men
treated women as intelligent human
beings and didn't try to intimidate or
belittle them when they are in sf
book shops, then they might feel
free to browse along bookshelves.

Anyway it was me, not my
husband, who placed a regular
orderfor SFM.

C O'Brien (Brentwood, Essex)

I was looking forward to the
article. Science Fiction in Rock
Music, but in the event found it
ratherdisappointingfora number of
reasons.

Gene Cochran (and SFM in
general) seems to have a thing about
Hawkwind and, to a lesser extent.
Pink Floyd, and the impression I got
was that the idea of an article on sf
in rock music was concocted as an
excuse for a discourse on Mr
Cochran’s favourite band. The
article that emerged consisted of a
reasonable piece on Pink Floyd and
a lengthy PR job on Hawkwind,

Winners of Crossword

with little more than a cursory
acknowledgement of other
manifestations of sf in rock.

It seems to me that Gene
Cochran has missed a golden
opportunity to explore an area that
has barely been touched before. As
the article points out. the music of
Pink Floyd and Hawkwind is not
totally sf-orientated. but there are
plenty of other people to whom this
also applies, whose music
nevertheless contains sf elements of
various sorts. Examples ? Early Roxy
Music with theirfuturistic stage
costumes and synthesised music,
particularly as evidenced by Eno
(who even at one time claimed to be
of extraterrestrial origin) ; Rick
Wakeman with h\sJourneytothe
Centre of the Edrth project ; Elton
John and BernieTaupin's iPoc/rer
Man and Eve Seen the Saucers:
one-offs like Nilsson's Spaceman,
the Kinks' Supersonic Rocket Ship,
King CumsQo's 21 St Century
Schizoid Man, and even Ricky
\N\\6e'sl Am An Astronaut. And then
there's the person who is probably
more steeped in sf than any of those
I've just mentioned - David Bowie.
What about his Diamond Dogs
album ; Saviour Machine: the very
early We Are Hungry Men (about
the dangers of overpopulation) ; the
whole concept oi Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars, but especially
Five Years. Drive-in Saturday and
the classic sf song (light years ahead
of Silver Machine) , Space Oddity ?

Now that Gene Cochran has got
Hawkwind out of his system,
perhaps SfA/f will publish an article
which really deserves the title
Science Fiction in Rock Music.

CR Stanley (Southsea. Hampshire)

Competition No 2

Science Fiction Monthly Vo! 1 No 8 featured our second sf crossword
competition and offered as prizes three copies of Christopher Priest's
collection of short stories Real-Time World. The winners are the authors
of the first three correct entries pulled out of the post bag and are as
follow:

Peter Pinto. D4 Bedfordbury, London WC2:

A Mclnnes. 50 Deveron Road, Bearsden, Glasgow G61 1 LN:and
DM Bath. 5 Fairweather Grove West, Uandaff, Cardiff CF52JN.

SOLUTION

Across: 1 Michael Moorcock. STolkienI 0 Sty. 1 2 Hunch. 13 Oak. 14 Ohe 15 lo. 17Tues, 18 Brian Aldiss.

20 Optic. 21 Team. 22 Schmitz. 26 Ra 27 Nail. 28 China 29 Stand On Zanzibar. 30 Sian. 31 (The) Star
King. 33 Bowery. 35 Starship Trooper.

Dov/n: 1 Matheson. 2 Chant. 3 Arthur C Clarke 4 Lallia 5 Olio. 6 Rank. 7 Keyes. 9 Earl. 10 Souse.

1 1 The Saliva Tree. 1 6 See 29 Across. 1 7 Titan. 1 8 Bis. 1 9 Astra. 23 Meson. 24 See 29 Across. 25 Titania.

28 Cosmos. 32 Gasp. 34 Who.

SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY 2.7

Continued from page 23

Great Britain and the other countries of the European Union were
girding themselves for the coming conflia with the American AUiance.
Their armies were mobilised, and in remote research stations project
teams were working inexorably towards newer horrors of scientific warfare.
Britain was in martial mood, and the erstwhile Consohdation Department,
under its new title of the Ministry of Offence, was recruiting personnel at a
prodigious rate.

None of this really bothered the Chairman of the Appointments Board
to the Ministry. What was important was the wealth of opportunity for his
celebrated dry wit, which he privately likened to ‘essence of cacti’, and
his pimctihous adherence to ‘Board Form’.

Glancing up from his papers, for a few seconds he blandly surveyed his
audience of five, who gazed back at him in glum resignation to verbose
egocentricity.

‘We have one more candidate for interview, gentlemen,’ he said mildly,
and then moistened his hps with water.

This was the cue for the man on his right to speak. The Staff
Relations Officer, yoimg, brilhant, and intensely image-conscious,
followed the current vogue by affecting a ridiculous mock French accent.
Thirty years previously he would probably have spoken in the chpped,
incisive American style. Today it was fashionable to imitate one’s GalHc
aUies in thought, word and deed.

The next candidate, he began in soft, hquid syllables, was one
Richard Shaw, who was due to arrive in five minutes time at three o’clock
This man had recently astounded the Rehabilitation Qjmmittee, to whom
he was assigned, by the phenomenal increase in his employabihty
coefficient, which the committee naturally attributed to the help they had
given him.

In addition, or, as the Staff Relations Officer put it, ‘adeeshyoong’,

Shaw claimed to have invented a military weapon of major significance.

This revelation jarred the idly-Ustening Board members out of their
semi-comatose studies. It wasn’t every day they had the opportunity to
consider a potential newcomer to the illustrious company of such products
of inhuman ingenuity as the automatic flaying machine, leprosy gas, and
the brain fluid cavitator.

The Appointments Board would consider Shaw for employment, and
would also decide whether or not his invention was worthy of
consideration by a Weapons Committee.

The last syrupy note of the Staff Relations Officer’s voice died in the
large, austere room. Each man attended to his thoughts, the Chairman
with his triumphs of Board Form, past and present, the last speaker
fiercely contemplative of his next dozen moves on the poUtical chess-
board, the others morosely considering various impUcations of the coming
eruption of military science.

The room had been thoroughly searched before the meeting. Only the
previous week an American spy had been discovered lashed to the
underside of the table in this very room. The juicy soimds of his
chomping on a wad of mentholated gum had proved his undoing. (He had
taken the precaution of jamming the building’s acoustic detectors, but had
overlooked the natural hearing faculty of the board members.)

Bong! The first stroke of nearby Little Ben clove the air. Its larger
predecessor had gone to the melting pots in the austerity drive of the
early nineties. The Chairman pursed his hps and prepared to dehver a
characteristic remark of withering dismissal, a dry observation to the
effect that possibly Mr Shaw’s weapon had proved to be conclusively
successful.

At the second stroke a shadow appeared on the translucent armorcrystal
window behind the Chairman’s left shoulder. Following the sudden gaze
of his colleagues, he turned half around in time to see, precisely at the
third stroke of three o’clock, the window shatter inwards in a shower
of glass, in the midst of which he ghmpsed a diving figure.

The Board members gaped at the intruder, sprawled on the maroon
carpet among thousands of crystal discs of similar shape and size to a fifty
pence piece. The newcomer was a rather shghtly built young man with
nondescript features, extraordinarily attired in a camouflage suit with
matching helmet.

^This weapon is an
instrument, not of death,
but of life. He carefully
squeezed the trigger again
and then slowly played the
soundless instrument over
the circular arc of anxious
faces. Its function may be
inferred from its name, the
harmonic escalator.’

On his back were strapped twin cylinders, also camouflaged, from which
flexible pipes snaked over his shoulders to a mysterious device resembhng
a sub-machine gun with a black, trumpet-like barrel, held firmly in his
grasp. The gun, if such it was, was pointed quite definitely, pointedly,
one might put it, at the Chairman.

This poor soul’s celebrated dry wit had undergone rapid and drastic
dehydration to the point of desiccated expiry. The Staff Relations Officer
was hastily debating whether to dive under the table or sing a snatch of
Yankee Doodle (blast his French accent) for, like the others, he beheved
the camouflage-clad figure was one of the vanguard of an American
invasion force.

‘Mr Chairman, gentlemen.’ The intruder bobbed his high-tensile hat
pohtely, ‘Richard Shaw, for interview.’ He smiled warmly at the amazed
gathering.

28 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY

A httle Yorkshireman, at the other end of the table, was the first to
break out of the gawking trance which held the entire body. He pointed a
shaking forefinger at the empty windowframe.

‘Armorcrystal has an ultimate strength approaching that of stainless
iron.’ His voice was an incredulous whisper. ‘And he shattered it like
a slab of butterscotch.’

Shaw flicked a glance at the speaker. ‘Consideration of the basic and
evident physical properties of the material, indicated a macroscopic
crystalline structure of lattice form, whose cleavage plane distribution
could be simply inferred by visual inspection of its refractive
characteristic.’

‘I see, I see,’ the Yorkshireman muttered. ‘And then you — .’

‘ — traced a knife-point along any seven distinctive planes on the
surface of the window,’ Shaw continued pleasantly.

‘So the strength of the matrix was exceeded on all the cleavage planes,’
another fellow cut in.

‘ — and the window-pane disintegrated,’ all three shouted
simultaneously.

‘This is unconstitutional!’ The Chairman had touched down to earth
again and was going to assert himself — to hell with Board Form. He
pawed hastily through a rather grubby black book which had appeared
from some unapparent source.

‘Standing Orders for Condurt of Pre- Induction Boards, Rule 25C,
Paragraph 2, states, “a candidate may be considered only if he has
conformed with formal presentation procedure as set out in Sub-Booklet
239, Interview Systems; Introductory".' He leafed rapidly through a second
and equally bedraggled handbook.

‘You,’ he stabbed an accusing finger at Shaw, ‘came in through the
window, a mode of entry which is clearly proscribed in — .’

At this point Shaw put him out of his misery by gently squeezing the
trigger of the weapon.

The Chairman paused, puzzlement spreading slowly over his red,
flustered features. His eyes took on a haunted, distant look, as though he
were strugghng to recapture the mood of some half-remembered,
bewitching melody. He raised hesitant fingers to his temples, then slowly
lowered them.

He shook his head twice and then the Board members were further
astonished to see the vague remoteness leave his face, to be magically
replaced by alert good-humour.

‘Why, this is marvellous.’ His voice was cheerful and natural-
sounding. ‘I haven’t felt hke this since, well. I’ve never felt hke this. How
did you do it ?’

Shaw returned his smile as he stood up. ‘Gentlemen,’ he addressed
the plainly apprehensive group of onlookers, ‘this weapon is in no sense
dangerous to anyone. It is an instrument, not of death, but of hfe.’

He carefully squeezed the trigger again, and then slowly played the
soundless instrument over the circular arc of anxious faces.

‘Its function, gentlemen, may be inferred from its name, the harmonic
escalator. A directional electromagnetic field penetrates the brain of the
subject and induces a redistribution of the phase pattern of the minute,
harmonic, electro-chemical impulses which determine the temperamental
state of the subject.’ He released the trigger, and let the harmonic
escalator fall to his side.

‘Negative, or harmful impulses,’ he continued, ‘are caused to act upon
and cancel each other, instead of diminishing the effect of the beneficial,
positive impulses.

‘The nett result is evident from your faces, gendemen.’

And so it was. Every man in the room felt a noticeable temperamental
improvement, along with an associated increase in alertness and mental
perception.

‘Is the effect persistent ?’ the Staff Relations Officer wanted to know.

In his elation, he had lapsed into his native Geordie dialect.

‘ “Persistent ?” Why, man, it’s permanent,’ Shaw informed him,
cheekily giving hke for like. ‘Once the modified phase pattern is estabhshed.
its new-found dominant energy level is strong enough to resist any
reversion to the old state.’

‘Why, this is the answer to — to everything.’ The Chairman voiced the
unanimous opinion of the Board. After what had happened there was
only one possible course of action. They lifted Shaw and his harmonic
escalator shoulder-high and jubilandy bore him off to the office of the
Minister.

How different from a previous interview at the Ministry, some years
past, when an astute interviewer, noting Dick’s lightly dancing foot
movements, had offered him a job on a machine-gun range on Sahsbury
Plain — as a target!

The sounds of the triumphal procession faded down the corridor. The
Chairman alone remained in the room, head bent over his papers and
whisthng as merrily as a songbird in spring. Briskly he set out notes
covering the latest and final extra-priority programme for the Ministry of
Offence. Harmonic escalators ; twenty-five mUhon hand weapons : harmonic
escalators ; thirty-one thousand aerial launchers : harmonic escalators ;
fourteen thousand ground vehicular units ; . . .

Shaw did not attend the victory parade in Washington; he was far too
busy. Indeed it was with some reluctance he joined in the celebrations
in London, and then he shpped away quietly after a couple of horns.
No-one minded; everyone was revelling in new-found joy and rehef. In
every city and town throughout the world victory was celebrated; victory
for sanity and reason; victory for co-operation and trust.

Just over two years elapsed before the next trans-stellar expedition
got under way, two years of happy, totally dedicated work by Shaw and
his team.

At this moment they are just beyond the orbit of Pluto, boimd for
Proxima Centauri and other pons of call. Dr Plumhart is with them;

‘just for the trip,’ he explains with a smile. There is very httle
employment for psycho-therapists on Earth these days, and, come to think
of it, there will be even less on ship.<^

Painting by Bob laytell